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How does Apple privately find offline devices?

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

111–120 of 184 posts

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#111
post #13

I see lots of poor Lassies in airports, conferencies and generally in crowded places. Not even mentioning flood or replay attacks. Lassie's help needs to have some limits otherwise it may quickly drain batteries or mobile plans especially in roaming.

I'm quite sure they've solved for this particular problem, or they wouldn't have launched the product...

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#112
Can the signal be jammed? Or simply put the stolen device in a metal box.

As for the tracking: I really like the idea. However, in my country finding your device isn't the issue, it is getting it back that's the problem. Police won't go and enter the particular house were your device is.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#113
post #76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds reasonable. I had no idea the T2 was that powerful.

It's also the SSD controller, and quite impressive in that regard.

I bet the T3, whenever that arrives, will be a derivative of the A12 or A13, and provide the neural network accelerator to MacOS and CoreML.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#114
post #46
post #13

I see lots of poor Lassies in airports, conferencies and generally in crowded places. Not even mentioning flood or replay attacks. Lassie's help needs to have some limits otherwise it may quickly drain batteries or mobile plans especially in roaming.

BLE is insanely battery-efficient. And in most scenarios with a lost device, it's either stationary or will be stationary for a sufficient period of time to be discovered, so a ping only once every hour is probably more than enough to locate it. Or a ping with exponential backoff as battery depletes. Sending the locations from these pings likewise also uses negligible battery, as Apple already coalesces timers and ne…

Yep. I have a BLE speed sensor on my bike which runs off a CR2032 coin cell. It's been two years of daily commuting and I've yet to change the battery.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#115
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this be already possible (and a lot cheaper) using something like Tile?

Yes, except you'd need to get your target to install the Tile app and use it frequently enough that it keeps background location privs. If Apple does come out with a cheap Tile-type device with a then this could be a legit concern. If you hid one in a person's belongings then you'd get hits from their phone- and turning it off wouldn't work, because random passersby would report their location as well. This could eve…

It must already be reasonably well along in development for it to be showing up in iOS builds.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/04/apple-tile-item-tracker...

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#116

Can the signal be jammed? Or simply put the stolen device in a metal box. As for the tracking: I really like the idea. However, in my country finding your device isn't the issue, it is getting it back that's the problem. Police won't go and enter the particular house were your device is.

I'm not sure how useful a device is that has to be kept in a metal box at all times.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#117
post #99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant, don't turn your phone into a beacon. (as a setting is ok) The idea would be yes -- connect to bluetooth headphones or your car. Connect to wifi in your home. Allow NFC transactions on command. But no, don't promiscuously advertise your device. Don't look up every bluetooth beacon you encounter or crowdsource every wifi access point.

If your WiFi is on, it’s already doing this. It’s saying, here’s all the networks I’ve joined in the past. Are you one?

> If your WiFi is on

Many people disable Wifi when they're not planning to be actively connected to a network. Even ignoring the privacy benefits, it can improve battery.

I'll add my voice that this is nice, and I appreciate Apple's approach and privacy improvements, but I'd kind of like to be able to turn Bluetooth on and off the same way I can with WiFi.

I want most connections on my phone (with a couple of small exceptions) to be user-initiated only.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#118
post #101

Well...a bit off topic but kind of relevant. My car got broken into and my iPad nicked. I was able to locate that, however, the cops here in NZ were really unhelpful. They said the GPS location wouldn't be sufficient for a search warrant as they have had many cases of false positives. I said I would give the ssid and ip address of their wifi network, even then they wouldn't agree for a raid. It was only when the thie…

It's not just NZ. Police in the US are no better. In the Dallas PD, the detective assigned to the case when our house was burgled would not respond to emails sent to him providing evidence. After reaching out through other avenues to reach the detective, he flat out responded with being too busy to read emails. The case went uncleared. However, a few weeks later, there was a random call saying they found an iPad repo…

I've noticed in my lifetime that a number of crimes have become ad-hoc decriminalized.

Smaller crimes like bicycle theft or small electronics are basically "who cares" to the police. Many police departments don't even do bicycle registrations anymore.

Even car theft has sort of fallen to insurance companies to take care of. A lot of people just want a police report to turn in to insurance so they can get a new car.

I don't know about serious crimes. Are people more often caught with lots of data and the erosion of privacy?

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#119
post #44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you do that? All Apple devices generate randomized MAC addresses for networks that they haven't connected to, so they shouldn't be able to track you. In addition, no other actors will be able to gain useful information from the bluetooth pings, they simply forward the encrypted data to Apple. All they can tell is that an Apple device exists nearby, but not who owns it or if they've seen the same device before.…

> Why do you do that? The short answer is because it makes me feel better. The long answer is that it prevents tracking my movements within a store. Stores appear to be increasingly installing and using such trackers, and I do not wish to be tracked. Not being able to be identified personally, or to be identified as the same person who was there last week or that I also went into other stores isn't sufficient to me.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted.

WiFi can be used to track most people's phones because they'll have personally identifiable networks they're set to auto-connect to. Randomizing the Mac address is not enough to prevent tracking in that scenario.

Unless Apple has some way to guard against this that I've never heard of? But I don't think they do.

JohnFen's root comment is totally wrong (Apple is encrypting your location so even they can't read it), but on the WiFi side of things this seems spot on to me. Turn your WiFi off when you leave your house.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#120
post #21
post #18

> The good news is that Apple claims that their system actually does provide strong privacy, and that it accomplishes this using clever cryptography. But that does nothing to protect your privacy against Apple. I already have to make sure that I disable WiFi and Bluetooth when I enter commercial establishments. Now I have to stop using Bluetooth whenever I leave my house?

It gets worse: if you turn off wifi/bluetooth in control center, it only disconnects, keeping the radio active. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086

You can use shortcuts to disable and enable things.

I use one labled ‘Car’ that turns off wifi, enables cellular data and BLT for the stereo and terminates after it ensures my (non-DNS) VPN is on. The other, ‘Home’ turns off cellular data and BLT, wifi on and again ensures my VPN is still active.

Also if you’ve got anything newer than a iPhone 6, you can 3D touch the settings icon to a pop-up menu to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Cellular Data and the Battery sub-menus. From there it’s an extra tap or two to disable stuff completely.

Formatting is likely terrible, I mobile-phoned this in..

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