Eddystone-EID

Eddystone-EID is another part of Eddystone specification, designed to secure the Eddystone advertising. This is achieved by having the beacon broadcast “ephemeral” identifiers that change every few minutes. However, an authorized app or service in possession of a special key can resolve the ephemeral identifier to a “real” one.

You can read more about it in Google’s own Eddystone Ephemeral Identifier documentation.

Info: Eddystone-EID also comes with encrypted Eddystone-TLM (also known as “Eddystone-eTLM”).

Using Eddystone-EID requires:

1. a resolving service: something that will take the ephemeral identifier, and translate it into a “real” one
   • since Eddystone is an open protocol, and that includes Eddystone-EID, you could take the EID Computation spec, and build your own resolver …
   • … or, you can use Google’s beacon cloud, which already implements one, and is built into Nearby
2. provisioning a beacon so that it actually starts advertising ephemeral identifiers
   • during that process, the beacon and the resolver exchange a secret key that allows the resolver to “decode” the ephemeral identifiers

In the family of Estimote Beacons, only Location Beacons support Eddystone-EID at this time, and due to the special provisioning required, we generally only offer it to select customers. You can send us an email to contact@estimote.com to learn more.