Apple has been working with companies like Google, Samsung, and Tile on a cross-industry effort to address the threat of tracking from products similar to AirTags.
For now, at least, the researchers say that the consortium seems to have adopted Apple's approach of rotating the device public identifiers once every 24 hours.
The privacy trade-off inherent in this solution made the researchers curious about whether it would be possible to design a system that better balanced both privacy and safety.
The solution Green and his fellow researchers came up with leans on two established areas of cryptography that the group worked to implement in a streamlined and efficient way so the system could reasonably run in the background on mobile devices without being disruptive.
If the conditions are right, the system can reconstruct the secret.
Secret sharing was conceptually useful for the researchers to employ because they could develop a mechanism where a device like a smartphone would only be able to determine that it was being followed around by an AirTag with a constantly rotating public identifier if the system received enough of a certain type of ping over time.
Suddenly, the suspicious AirTag's anonymity would fall away and the system would be able to determine that it had been in close proximity for a concerning amount of time.
Green notes that a limitation of secret sharing algorithms is that they aren't very good at sorting and parsing inputs if they're being deluged by a lot of different puzzle pieces from all different puzzles-the exact scenario that would occur in the real world where AirTags and Find My devices are constantly encountering each other.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:43:05 +0000