iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise
arstechnica.com
“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.

iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14::“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.

  • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
    634·
    1 year ago

    this is whitewashing Apple. It was introduced in iOS 14. A trillion dollar company like apple should have had this fixed long before.

    • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      Lol, and Apple didn’t even “discover” it themselves. It was 2 unaffiliated security researchers who did. Who knows if they even implemented any logic besides the UI.

      • poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        If you had read the article, you would have known that the bug relates to a very specific field inside a multicast payload and a network-specific unique MAC address is generated and retained as advertised. I’m not defending Apple; just reiterating the facts.

        • eskimofry@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          The way multicast works is that the destination mac address starts with 01 00 5e and then next 3 octets (mac addresses are 6 octets long) are copied from the IP address lower octets. The mac address is always this when building the L2 headers for the packet.

          • poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            It’s not specified what precisely is provided in the payload of the multicast body. I suspect that the original MAC address is included in something like a Bonjour broadcast, but I wasn’t able to find any documentation that confirms that.

    • ink@r.nfEnglish
      153·
      1 year ago

      apple should have had this fixed long before

      not if it was intentional. I mean apple bends over for authoritarian governments around the world. This could easily be used as a state surveillance apparatus and casually “fixed” when discovered down the road as a “bug”.

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        83·
        1 year ago

        yeah I agree that it was intentional. I can’t believe Apple didn’t properly test this feature. But I didn’t want to speculate without actual proof

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Why not? Everyone else seems to be doing it, you’re probably just some Portuguese pastrie chef with a bad hair cut and a paid off mortgage