Windows 10 LESC?

[Rocky]

Has anyone been able to use the LE Secure Connections feature with Windows?

I see that there are some planned improvements in the Windows 10 creators update, but don't see any mention of BLE 4.2 or LESC. I am working on a product that currently uses the BLED112 dongle with Windows, but this dongle doesn't support 4.2/LESC. In fact, I don't see any dongles on the market that support 4.2.

Any tips or thoughts on how to implement LESC on a Windows machine would be greatly appreciated.

[Daniel Wang]

You can use a nRF51 dongle: www.nordicsemi.com/.../nRF51-Dongle

[Rocky]

I posted a similar question on the Microsoft forum and got this response.

Hi! Windows 10 Creators update does not yet support Bluetooth 4.2. LE Secure Connections along with other 4.2 features will come to a future release. Thanks!

So, yeah, the nRF51 dongle might be the best bet for now. The problem is that it isn't really in a commercialized package (like the BLED112). Also, I am not sure if it has fully been through approvals for general commercial use. It would be great if someone made a commercialized dongle with the new nRF52840, but I don't see anything yet. The pc-ble-driver is a nice interface to the dongle, so that would work well.

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi TJ, 

you can use our pc-ble-driver library together with a nRF52840 Dongle to implement LESC on Windows. 

Best regards

Bjørn

[Rocky]

Hi,

Yes, I see that the the nRF52840 is now released and working with the pc-ble-driver.  I usually use the Python wrapper (pc-ble-driver-py), but the support for this is lagging and I don't think it yet works with the nRF52840.  Perhaps I could switch to C/C++ and implement using the pc-ble-driver directly.

Do you have any thoughts or examples on how I could implement a central that supports LESC using pc-ble-driver?  It seems like this would require quite a bit of additional code to get working.  For example, wouldn't I need to port one of the crypto libraries and some of the SDK libraries like nrf_crypto, and security_manager to the Windows build?

Any other suggestions are welcome.  My goal is to create a PC test station to be used to test the security implementation (LESC) on a peripheral.

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi TJ, 

You are right that you will need to generate the public and private DH encryption keys. We use the pc-ble-driver in nRF Connect for Desktop, which supports LESC paring.  Not quite sure how we solve this in nRF Connect. I will contact the devs and see if they can shed some light on this. 

Bjørn