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WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

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Re: WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

#4
I was curious as to how Apple implemented AirDrop discovery (particularly the Contacts Only feature) because their documentation is helpful, but vague[1]. I spent a night reverse engineering it, and this is the process:

1. Alice opens the AirDrop sheet.

2. Alice begins advertising her short "proximity"[2] hashes over BTLE.

3. Bob, continually scanning in the background, sees Alice and her hashes.

4. If Bob either a) has the "Everyone" setting enabled, or b) has a match to one of Alice's proximity hashes in his contacts, Bob connects to Alice over AWDL.

6. Bob starts a HTTP server.

7. Bob advertises a Bonjour service for his HTTP server.

8. Alice sends a discovery request.

9. If the request is valid, Bob sends a discovery response (including device model, name and icon).

Also to note, the author, Mario Ciabarra is the (co?)-founder of Rock Your Phone, the alternative to Cydia until the two merged in 2010[3].

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_20... (Page 23)

[2] Each device hashes every phone number and email in its address book with SHA256 after normalizing them. These hashes are referred to as full hashes. The "proximity" hashes are the first two bytes of the long hash. The full hashes are not broadcasted, but they are verified later over AWDL.

[3] http://www.tuaw.com/2010/09/11/alliance-of-the-jailbreakers-...

Re: WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

#5
At least in previous releases, you could disable AirDrop on OS X:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser DisableAirDrop -boolean YES

I don't have any Bluetooth-LE hardware to confirm whether this affects the newer-style AirDrop reported as the problem.

Re: WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

#6
I had this same issue on my 5S and a majority of my friends with that particular model seems to be experiencing that as well.

In any case, after browsing the apple support forums, I decided to try a few of the workarounds there and the only one which worked was by setting my 2.4ghz interface to b/g(legacy)-only mode.

It was an acceptable fix since all my other devices were on the 5ghz and I don't really have any other option(7.1.2 was great for me, shouldn't have upgraded).

Re: WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

#7
On a related note, I believe there is also a hardware problem on the iPhone 6 plus' 4G LTE radio for ATT. Same network, but my old nokia 1020 had a much faster network connection. This is annecdotal, but there are reports in other forums also.

Re: WiFried: iOS 8 WiFi Issue

#9
post #4

I was curious as to how Apple implemented AirDrop discovery (particularly the Contacts Only feature) because their documentation is helpful, but vague[1]. I spent a night reverse engineering it, and this is the process: 1. Alice opens the AirDrop sheet. 2. Alice begins advertising her short "proximity"[2] hashes over BTLE. 3. Bob, continually scanning in the background, sees Alice and her hashes. 4. If Bob either a)…

Very interesting. How did you go about reverse engineering it? Would you mind sharing?
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