The Beijing Bureau of Justice claims it can trace senders of Apple AirDrop messages.
Chinese protesters have been using this iPhone protocol to privately spread memes of dissent against the regime.
As it turns out, AirDrop isn't as anonymous as they thought.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.
To get around censorship people turned to Apple's AirDrop feature, which doesn't require cellular service and uses Bluetooth and a private Wi-Fi network to send images and photos.
During the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, protesters frequently used AirDrop to share pamphlets and posters.
In 2022 protestors again turned to AirDrop to spread awareness of protests and anti-Xi messages.
The firm speaks of rainbow table attacks on device logs.
The sender's email address and phone number are just part of the protocol.
This has been publicly documented by Apple for several years.
Given the low entropy of phone numbers, building a dictionary of all possible phone number hashes is trivial.
Apple is totally dependent on China and is desperately trying to diversify out.
If Apple doesn't patch this it will set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the oppressive governments around the world.
I hope Apple gives the CCP the well deserved middle finger and locks it down.
Scaring people is a lot more scalable than arresting them.
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This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 18:13:05 +0000