Smart Glasses Recording-Indicator Trust Model

Recording State

Indicator Architecture

Attack Surface

Firmware compromise 0%

BLE beacon jamming 0%

Bystander distance 3.0 m

Live Readouts

LED reliability

100%

BLE detection P

Covert recording incidents (LED suppressed while recording)

How it works

Real smart glasses defend bystander privacy with two independent channels: a physical LED indicator and a wireless recording-state beacon (e.g. BLE advertisement). Each has a different trust root.

Hardware-wired LED:
  LED state ≡ camera power rail state   → reliability = 100%, always
  (malicious firmware cannot dim a wire it doesn't control)

Software-controlled LED:
  LED state = driven by firmware        → reliability R = 1 − c
  c = firmware compromise fraction ∈ [0,1]
  each recording tick, P(indicator suppressed) = c

BLE bystander beacon (independent of the LED):
  received signal power  S(d) = P0 / d²         (inverse-square falloff)
  effective SNR          = S(d) · (1 − j)        j = jamming fraction ∈ [0,1]
  detection probability  P_detect = clamp01(SNR)

Hardware-wired vs software-controlled — the toggle chooses the LED's trust root. Only the software path is vulnerable to firmware compromise.
Firmware compromise slider — the fraction of recording ticks a compromised software LED silently fails to light; it has zero effect when the LED is hardware-wired, demonstrating why privacy-critical indicators are pinned to a physical circuit rather than a driver.
BLE jamming slider — attenuates the second, wireless channel; the bystander device's detection probability falls with both distance (inverse-square) and jamming strength.
Covert recording incidents — counts every tick where recording was active but the LED failed to show it, i.e. a bystander looking directly at the glasses would have seen nothing.

Defense-in-depth relevance: this two-channel design (physical indicator + wireless beacon, as used by products like Ray-Ban Meta) means an attacker must defeat an unspoofable hardware circuit and a wireless protocol at once to record covertly — collapsing either channel alone is not enough.

Recording LED BLE beacon ring Bystander (aware) Bystander (unaware)

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