Upgrade to BLE Spec 4.2 with new softdevice

[atummac]

I am currently using softdevice 8.0.0.

I am curious if the nRF51822 will be upgradable to be 4.2 compliant with a new softdevice release in the future? My understanding is that the nRF51822 is only compliant with 4.1 at the moment.

The specific part of 4.2 I am interested in comes from the Bluetooth SIG website:

With the release of the Bluetooth Core Specification version 4.2, security is greatly enhanced by the new LE Secure Connections pairing model. In this new model, the numeric comparison method is added to the other three methods and the Elliptical Curve Hellman-Diffie (ECDH) algorithm is introduced for key exchange in this process.

[Ulrich Myhre]

Hi

It is not mandatory to support all the features in the new specs to claim compliance, so if you are interested in a particular feature you should refer to that one specifically. Our S130 SoftDevice is 4.2 compliant, but do not support LE Secure Connections as of today. S110 8.0.0 is compliant to 4.1 as you mention, but only implement the Privacy 1.1, low duty-cycle directed advertisement and concurrent broadcaster features.

For future advances and timelines, you would have to contact a sales representative. Requests to those teams help developers focus on the right features at the right time. If you do not know your local sales representative, shoot me a message with your location and I will provide you with the contact information.

[Ulrich Myhre]

It would be quite slow, but it is not outside the realm of possibility. Since key generation happens seldom, it could be done with little impact for applications with longer connections.