322

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 (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Confuserated@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago

tl;dr It was a bug. It is fixed in 17.1.

[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 59 points 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.dev 14 points 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.world 8 points 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.world 1 points 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.world 1 points 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.nf 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.world 5 points 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.world 4 points 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

[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Hmm, tldr bot didn’t mention this…

[-] ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

This is why we call it artificial intelligence, rather than digital intelligence.

this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023

322 points (95.5% liked)

Technology

59038 readers

3073 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS