HomeCybersecuritySmartwatch BLE Pairing & Key Exchange

Smartwatch BLE Pairing & Key Exchange

Interactive 3D visualizer of the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman handshake a smartwatch and phone run to pair over Bluetooth LE — watch how Numeric Comparison catches a man-in-the-middle that Just Works pairing misses.

Cybersecurity3DAdvanced60 FPS
exp-smartwatches-security ↗ Open standalone

Every time a smartwatch pairs with a phone over Bluetooth Low Energy, the two devices run a real elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman handshake to agree on a session key without ever transmitting a secret. This simulator renders that handshake in 3D on a genuine (deliberately small) elliptic curve over a finite field: watch and phone each pick a private scalar, publish a public point computed with real modular point-addition, and derive matching session keys from each other's public point. Toggle between "Just Works" and "Numeric Comparison" pairing, then introduce a passive eavesdropper or an active man-in-the-middle attacker to see exactly why Just Works pairing is silently vulnerable while Numeric Comparison's 6-digit code catches the same attack before any data is exchanged — and watch a brute-force key search finish instantly on this toy-sized curve, the same search that is computationally infeasible against the 256-bit curve real BLE hardware actually uses.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D visualizer of the real elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman handshake a smartwatch and phone run to pair over Bluetooth LE, showing how Numeric Comparison pairing catches a man-in-the-middle that Just Works pairing misses.

bluetoothcryptographyECDHwearablesMITMpairing

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install

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