Is it possible to change on air address (access address) in BLE advertising

[vbachler]

I would like to hide BLE advertising from normal BLE scanner software. And only be able to see such advertising with dedicated scanner.

I was thinking of changing access address from 0x8E89BED6 to something else which would hopefully cause normal ble scanners to ignore such advertising.

Is such thing possible? Should that be done by changing NRF_RADIO->PREFIX0 and NRF_RADIO->BASE0 registers?

I'm using S110, and changing value of this registers causes hard fault. Is there a way to do such a thing?

[ovrebekk]

Hi

We have source code for doing advertising without the SoftDevice, and in this case you can change the access address. The problem is that there is no API on the phone side to change the access address for BLE advertisements, so you would need a Nordic based scanner device to pick them up (if there were such an API then anyone else would be able to use it also, so maybe this is an advantage).

Then you can change the access address of the advertise packets, and make them invisible to normal BLE scanners.

If you want something that works on ordinary phones then you might have to encrypt the data instead, and keep the standard access address. Then people can see the advertise packets, but will be unable to read the payload content.

Best regards
Torbjørn

[vbachler]

Great, I found code for advertising without soft device github.com/.../blessed. Where access address can be modified. Now BLE device is not visible from standard ble scanner app. So now there is a problem how to make it visible from dedicated scanner - which is another issue. Thanks for help.

[ovrebekk]

I am happy to help :)

As I said I am not sure it is possible to make the phone pick up these packets. You could potentially make a Nordic based bridge, that would connect to the phone over BLE and report on the scanned packets.