Invalid Bluetooth Address

What happens if I change my bluetooth address to

(00:00:00:00:00:00)

This address looks pretty nice. And in fact it is possible to change the address of your bluetooth dongle to (00:00:00:00:00:00). But only once. After that Windows Device Manager shows the following error - "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)". And bluetooth doesn't work anymore.

Bluetooth radio error code 43

In Linux you get similar error in the syslog:

bluetoothd[...]: No address available for hci0     
or
bluetoothd[...]: No Bluetooth address for index 0  

This happens because bluetooth addresses internally represented by a 64-bit integers and (00:00:00:00:00:00) corresponds to zero, which also has special meaning - no address or some error.

To protect our users we have banned this address in the version 1.3 of Bluetooth MAC Address Changer.

Unbrick tool (Update 21.09.2019)

There is a proof of concept application which can help to fix bluetooth adapter with zero address. The sources are published on GitHub

 

Add new comment