Bastille’s Differentiating Technology

Advanced Cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) DETECTION, AND RESPONSE

The focus for most customers is obtaining visibility into devices using the Big Four protocols: Cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy. Bastille detects and locates them all of the time. Other vendors cannot detect cellular at all or can only detect cellular when the phone sends a RACH to rejoin the network. Bastille tracks every transmission in cellular frequencies to give you the most up to date location.

Other vendors claim “Bluetooth detection” but they are actually only detecting Bluetooth Low Energy devices and they are only detecting them when the devices are in “advertising mode.” Once the BLE device finds a partner and pairs with it, those devices disappear from the competitors’ screens. Only Bastille continues to locate both ends of the BLE device throughout the connection.

Bastille’s Accurate Cellular and RF Device detection

Core to the Bastille solution is the accurate localization of cell phones and other RF emitters within the area under observation. Previous generations of solutions based on spectrum analyzer approaches or basic SDRs with limited analytics have only been able to present clouds of cellular energy which may contain one or ten devices, one meter or ten meters away.

Bastille’s breakthrough and patented work provides Bastille the ability to disambiguate multiple cell phones and accurately locate those individual devices in real-time.

Cellular Localization: Heatmaps versus Dots

Bastille conducts a real-time emitter differentiation of all cellular emitters, which contributes to our industry-leading LTE localization performance. This is in contrast to others that can only provide a “mist” or heatmap of LTE energy. Heatmaps of RF energy require a sophisticated signals intelligence operator to determine if there is one phone or 10 in a space, do not provide actionable deterministic alerts, and do not provide the discrete position estimate for each LTE emitter in the space.

Industry Leading Bluetooth and BLE Device Location

Bastille is the only solution to detect both Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy as distinct device protocols and then to show which of these devices are paired with each other. Bastille has several patents issued and pending for visibility into these protocols covering what kinds of data those protocols are communicating and what kinds of network connections they have.

Bluetooth uses 79 channels, at 1 MHz wide each, Bluetooth Low Energy uses 40 channels that are 2 MHz wide each, and they have very different characteristics. When your phone goes into Bluetooth ready-to-pair mode, it starts transmitting on an advertising channel, and in that state, it’s meant to be highly visible. Even your laptop could pick up that kind of transmission. However, when the Bluetooth device enters a piconet, i.e. pairs with another device, it starts using the data channels and it stops using advertising channels. If you are relying on a less sophisticated or older generation sensor solution, it probably uses a hardware Bluetooth decoder that can only see one channel at a time, and will not see all the data traffic for that Bluetooth device.

This means that with other solutions, once a Bluetooth or a Bluetooth Low Energy device enters into a network with other devices, it becomes invisible to them because it stops transmitting on the advertising channel. This is exactly when you don’t want them to be invisible! Bastille’s proprietary SDRs see all the channels all the time, and understand which devices, such as wrist worn fitness devices and phones, are communicating with each other. Bastille puts a dot on a map for all the Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy devices in your space.

If you want to understand where ALL Bluetooth devices are, what they are connected to and how active they are, then Bastille has the only solution.

Bluetooth and BLE Based Voice and Data Exfiltration

Bastille not only shows device location, but also network state connection. This is important because if you have a facility where you allow a health monitoring wristband or watch into the secured area, but not cell phones, you expect that all cell phones are left outside or turned off and placed in a locker at the door. However, if the cell phone is not powered down, the connection between the phone and the fitness device can still be active. Since Bluetooth connections can persist for over 300 feet, you can have a live data connection from a secure area to an unsecured cell phone outside the secure area. Bastille can detect that happening, and can detect the difference between a connected device and unconnected device and give you an alert that you can adjudicate.

For more information please contact us or request a demo.