Hello, everyone! Quick question for those who are more experienced and knowledgeable than I am:
Background if you care to know why I ask the question:
I was recently realizing the need for me of using a real mouse for my laptop as I was starting to feel discomfort with using the touchpad and don’t want to develop any nerve issues as many do over time on today’s technology (Carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.). This led me to picking up an old wired mouse I had used ages ago and then realizing how nice a wireless mouse would be for a laptop that travels as much as I do (often packing up and unpacking my laptop setup 5 or 6 times a day).
So I dug a bit. I’m pretty new here still, and I never cared about Qubes not really supporting bluetooth as I always thought it was reasonable, and I just plug in wired headphones and use the integrate keyboard and touchpad. But in my digging I saw that, since I had last really looked into Bluetooth seriously years ago, there were some new things in existence. And I’d love to get some facts and judgements from other who may have more knowledge than I do.
Questions
1.Bluetooth Low Energy seems to incorporate a true encryption scheme now. Ironically the wikipedia page is missing the “Security” section at this time, but Apple has a page talking through the security features that are supported by the tech here. Now, I imagine that perhaps not every device actively chooses to employ every security feature? And obviously it is still an omnidirectional wireless signal which is not ideal for security in a basic sense, but is the technology finally mature enough to be reasonably secure for most non-critical use cases? Such as mouse, headphones, etc.? I have no idea, so no bias here. Just curious about the state of this in the Qubes project.
- Logitech is finally releasing a new wireless dongle technology that is based on BTLE, but with additional encryption and a few security-related tweaks (described in this whitepaper: Logi BOLT PDF. I’d appreciate any thoughts on this too. It looks a lot better than the old “unifying receiver” Logitech used for ages. Would something like this be reasonable to use in Qubes for a mouse, or possibly even a keyboard? For me the mouse is a much bigger deal ergonomically, but I have seen a lot of people asking about keyboards recently, so I wanted to find out what I could.
Thanks all!