AirTag of the Clones: Shenanigans with Liberated Item Finders

Roth, Thomas; Freyer, Fabian; Hollick, Matthias; Classen, Jiska

doi:10.1109/spw54247.2022.9833881

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The AirTags emit a beacon message constantly, which is picked up by the nearby iPhones, Macs, or other Apple devices. This allows the Apple Cloud to obtain the AirTag's exact location in the centimeter range [30,31].…”

Section: Crowd Monitoring Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Network Model for Assisting People with Disabilities through Crowd Monitoring and Control

Falcon-Caro,

Peytchev,

Sanei

2024

Bioengineering

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Here, we present an effective application of adaptive cooperative networks, namely assisting disables in navigating in a crowd in a pandemic or emergency situation. To achieve this, we model crowd movement and introduce a cooperative learning approach to enable cooperation and self-organization of the crowd members with impaired health or on wheelchairs to ensure their safe movement in the crowd. Here, it is assumed that the movement path and the varying locations of the other crowd members can be estimated by each agent. Therefore, the network nodes (agents) should continuously reorganize themselves by varying their speeds and distances from each other, from the surrounding walls, and from obstacles within a predefined limit. It is also demonstrated how the available wireless trackers such as AirTags can be used for this purpose. The model effectiveness is examined with respect to the real-time changes in environmental parameters and its efficacy is verified.

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Section: Crowd Monitoring Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Network Model for Assisting People with Disabilities through Crowd Monitoring and Control

Falcon-Caro,

Peytchev,

Sanei

2024

Bioengineering

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“…With regard to commercial devices, Roth et al [25] analyse the hardware and firmware used in Apple's AirTags. Mayberry et al [26] study some malicious tracker techniques that have been used to track persons and propose several protection mechanisms.…”

Section: Wireless Communications and Mobile Computingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis and Evaluation of Tracker Tag Efficiency

Hernández-Orallo

Armero-Martínez

Calafate

et al. 2023

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

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Tracker tags, such as Apple’s AirTags and Tile’s trackers, are small and cheap devices for finding lost items. Tags use Bluetooth technology and community tracking to find the location of lost tags whenever a compatible smartphone passes nearby. When we lose a tag, several questions may arise, like what are the chances of finding it? Or, when will we receive a notification of its detection? Unfortunately, companies such as Apple or Tile do not provide technical information about the efficiency of their tags. Thus, this paper is aimed at answering those questions based on a methodological analysis and evaluation of tags’ efficiency. The main aspects that impact the efficiency of finding a lost tag are the detection range, community size, and human mobility. These aspects are evaluated in a campus scenario, showing that the probability of finding lost tags is very high: more than 98% of them were found, and the average detection time was about 1 hour.

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“…Since Apple has not publicly released technical specifications for Find My enabled devices or the Find My protocol, there is a great deal of prior work solving this problem by reverse engineering the protocol [16], extracting and analyzing the AirTag firmware [22,25], and constructing tools to detect and analyze Find My traffic [14,20]. Researchers have also studied ISAs [21] specifically, analyzing when they are produced and how they can be circumvented.…”

Section: Background and Related Work 21 Prior Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blind My - An Improved Cryptographic Protocol to Prevent Stalking in Apple's Find My Network

Mayberry

Blaß

Fenske

2023

PoPETs

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In 2020, Apple introduced the Find My protocol, which allows owners to crowdsource the location of their lost Apple devices even when the lost device has no active internet connection (e.g., Wi-Fi, Cellular). The Find My protocol is the basis for Apple's AirTag tracking tokens which were released later in 2021. In order to prevent malicious use of these tokens, Apple also implemented ``item safety alerts'' which can warn a person if they are being tracked by an AirTag without their knowledge. However, researchers have recently identified several shortcomings with these alerts that allow modified AirTags to track unsuspecting victims indefinitely without being detected. Making matters worse, while recognizing the observed malicious use of AirTags, news reports, Apple's press releases, and their intended anti-tracking improvements to the protocol do not consider the potential surreptitious use of the Find My network by custom built AirTag clones. In this work, we present an improved Find My protocol which effectively limits the capabilities of malicious AirTags and guarantees that they can be detected while tracking. We accomplish this by adding additional cryptographic verification into the protocol, which restricts tags to only using a bounded set of keys while tracking. In order to maintain - and exceed - the privacy guarantees of the current Find My protocol, we make use of specialized partial blind signatures. To demonstrate the practicality of this protocol, we implement it end-to-end using a programmable device with the same SoC (nRF52832) as in current AirTags. We also benchmark the cryptographic operations of our protocol and show that they require only modest overhead during the initial pairing procedure.

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AirTag of the Clones: Shenanigans with Liberated Item Finders

Cited by 9 publications

References 7 publications

Adaptive Network Model for Assisting People with Disabilities through Crowd Monitoring and Control

Adaptive Network Model for Assisting People with Disabilities through Crowd Monitoring and Control

Analysis and Evaluation of Tracker Tag Efficiency

Blind My - An Improved Cryptographic Protocol to Prevent Stalking in Apple's Find My Network

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