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Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

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Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#171

Post by whoisburbansky »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #79
bushbaba wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll be pretty shocked if I’m “spied on” with this style of device. Why? There's plenty of devices in the wild constantly looking for wifi connection attempts, BLE Scans. Even cellular provider track locations in real-time by logging what cell towers you're using and associated signal strength. Just search for a place in google maps, and note the "Popular Times". How do you think they got that data :D

The protocol they use explicitly protects against this attack vector.

Details of the rotating key used so that persistent tracking based off of the BLE beacon isn’t possible: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#172

Post by antman »

snvzz wrote: post #162
esalman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swappable battery is a trend that should return- to both phones and electric vehicles.

Won't happen w/o legislation.

Non removable battery and minimum percentage of phones sold with gps were promoted by governments (from old HN posts if I recall correctly). Actually there is no technical need for most phones not to have non removable batteries.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#173

Post by krrrh »

megablast wrote: post #85
ssss11 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did not know that’s how Find My worked - very interesting

It is how the new feature works. The old feature did not work this way.

The comment is a bit incomplete in its description, but it looks like an accurate description of how Find My Phone has always worked. All that’s new is that a turned off device will be respond to queries.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#174

Post by dylan604 »

dcow wrote: post #135
dylan604 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, there's only two mobile OS players. All of these upstarts don't have enough market share to count (hopefully, just for now). Nobody's family members use something other than iOS/Android. Maybe some of your friends do, but that's a small market. With that established, just because one uses iOS/Android does not mean they are not about openess or security or privacy or whatever. It probably just means the…

Which is why his twitter thing felt so odd and uncharacteristic especially coming from a professor of cryptography nonetheless. AOP has been around for years. If he's made the concession to use an iPhone because that's where people are, why freak out about some new feature like you were born yesterday? This is Apple, you know they don't document shit. Go look at core crypto... it's doc-gen function signatures and str…

I totally agree this totally feels like someone making noise to get attention even though the subject is closer to a mole hill approaches mountain in stature.

I just think the attack "smart guy" for using iOS/Android meme is lame.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#175

Post by imglorp »

ddingus wrote: post #163
imglorp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it. There is still the ultrasonic channel: beacons are emitted by various tv's, stores, etc. which can be used to capture location and other data and exfiltrate from the phone with the right software running. And of course the regular microphone can capture conversations and media. If the bag is not opaque, there is still an optical channel. Plus there are still accelerometers and magnetometers which can do r…

Where can I read about these? Audio beacons, I mean.

https://hackaday.com/2017/05/04/ultrasonic-tracking-beacons

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/your-...

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/hundreds-apps-can-listen-beaco...

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#176

Post by SilverRed »

m0zg wrote: post #152
SilverRed wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They show it clearly above the slider when shutting down. Since this is a feature virtually 100% of users want on. This seems appropriate.

If they aren't under a gag order, that is. If they are, you won't even know it's on.

If you don't trust the software to do what it says, then none of this matters anyway since they could have added this in silently ages ago or they could push custom firmwares out to targeted individuals to do it.

Everything is based on the trust of the OS and hardware so it's not a useful point to make.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#177

Post by beckman466 »

ekianjo wrote: post #170
heydabop wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to get that radical with "nothing to hide". Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt, if you could setup a webcam in their living room, or if you could just read some texts between them and a significant other. Or ask for their passwords, date of birth, SSN, credit card numbers, pets' names, and parents' names. Simple things like this are why I talk to people via Signa…

Signal is centralized and is an obvious target for surveillance so I would not even remotely rely on it.

And most devices have backdoored CPUs too (Intel ME)

I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#178

Post by mhh__ »

pantalaimon wrote: post #64
Iolaum wrote: post #49

So according to the post iphones now have an AOP (Always on Processor) running a proprietary operating system with access to other phone components. Do we know if other manufacturers also include such a processor? A quick google search showed a relevant apple patent [0] and a similar qualcomm processor product for wearables [1] which suggests to me this (always on processors on consumer electronics) "is out there ...…

The iPhone already runs a proprietary operating system.

With a closed source compiler (Apple clang is not the clang you or I can compile, unless they have no tuning models for their own silicon)

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#179

Post by m0zg »

SilverRed wrote: post #176
m0zg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they aren't under a gag order, that is. If they are, you won't even know it's on.

If you don't trust the software to do what it says, then none of this matters anyway since they could have added this in silently ages ago or they could push custom firmwares out to targeted individuals to do it. Everything is based on the trust of the OS and hardware so it's not a useful point to make.

Software, sure, but up until this I could at least trust that if I turn my iPhone off it's not spying on me. Now I don't even have that. It's amazing the people _on this site_ in particular don't see a problem with this, and think it won't be abused by three letter agencies and their foreign counterparts.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#180

Post by 2fast4you »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #84
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now have an AOP (Always on Processor) They've long had this. It's how they turn on when picked up (by tracking the motion sensor) or when touching the screen (tracking capacitive sensor)

This seems different to those examples because it works when the phone is powered off. AFAIK neither pick up nor touching the screen have ever done anything when the phone is powered off, only when it’s asleep.

It’s still the same AOP coprocessor
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