HID gamepad not working when paired with blueman on bluez 5.68-0ubuntu1.1

[Romeo]

Hello,

I updated from 5.68-0ubuntu1 to 5.68-0ubuntu1.1 and my bluetooth gamepad (8bitdo Pro 2) stopped working. It no longer was detected by various emulator software or by jstest-gtk. It stopped showing up in /dev/input/ as well.

Here are the logs that I get on connection with the broken (new) version:

Dec 10 13:12:23 laptop bluetoothd[6317]: src/profile.c:record_cb() Unable to get Hands-Free Voice gateway SDP record: Host is down
Dec 10 13:12:43 laptop bluetoothd[6317]: profiles/input/device.c:ioctl_is_connected() Can't get HIDP connection info
Dec 10 13:12:45 laptop bluetoothd[6317]: profiles/input/device.c:hidp_add_connection() Rejected connection from !bonded device E4:17:DE:AD:BE:EF

Here are the logs that I get on connection with the old (working) version:

Dec 10 13:37:17 laptop bluetoothd[7736]: src/profile.c:record_cb() Unable to get Hands-Free Voice gateway SDP record: Host is down
Dec 10 13:38:30 laptop bluetoothd[7736]: profiles/input/device.c:ioctl_is_connected() Can't get HIDP connection info

I think that the indicator of issues (or at least a red herring) is the "Rejected connection from !bonded device" line in the broken output. I've redacted my MAC address obviously.

I think that two packages are involved with this and I am not quite sure where exactly the bug lives. I think that both the "bluez" and "bluez-obexd" packages are involved. If I mix the versions between these two, I get various different behaviors:

bluez-obexd 1.1 and bluez 1.1 = broken behavior
bluez-obexd 1 and bluez 1.1 = broken behavior
bluez-obexd 1 and bluez 1 = working behavior
bluez-obexd 1.1 and bluez 1 = unable to connect bluetooth device

[Romeo (romeo-b)]

Until this bug is fixed, other users can get the previous function back by running

sudo apt install bluez-obexd=5.68-0ubuntu1 bluez=5.68-0ubuntu1
sudo apt-mark hold bluez bluez-obexd

I think that this undoes a security update (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluez/5.68-0ubuntu1.1) for this CVE (https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-45866), but if you care more about your controller working than you do the possibility of someone injecting keystrokes while your computer is in "discoverable" mode then it seems like a fair trade-off.

[Romeo (romeo-b)]

Hello,

I was able to find a similar issue on the bluez github here (https://github.com/bluez/bluez/issues/673) and after investigating a bit further, I am able to get things working on the current update from Canonical if I pair the device using bluetoothctl instead of with blueman. Instructions on how to do that are in this (https://github.com/bluez/bluez/issues/673#issuecomment-1849132576) comment.

I think that this might be an issue with how blueman handles authentication with gamepad devices, not with how bluez does.

[Romeo (romeo-b)]

I can't figure out how to close this bug here on launchpad, but the issue is resolved if you look at this (https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/2219) Github page.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

See also bug 2045931. It's the same security patch, different BlueZ and Ubuntu release.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Re comment #3, it doesn't sound fixed, just moved to https://github.com/bluez/bluez/issues/673