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Apple knew AirDrop users could be identified and tracked as early as 2019, researchers say | CNN Business
Security researchers warned Apple as early as 2019 about vulnerabilities in its AirDrop wireless sharing function that Chinese authorities claim they recently used to track down users of the feature, the researchers told CNN, in a case that experts say has sweeping implications for global privacy.
A group of Germany-based researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt, who first discovered the flaws in 2019, told CNN Thursday they had confirmation Apple received their original report at the time but that the company appears not to have acted on the findings. But, according to a separate 2021 analysis of the Darmstadt research by the UK-based cybersecurity firm Sophos, Apple appeared not to have taken the extra precaution of adding bogus data to the mix to further randomize the results — a process known as “salting.” That apparent failure allowed the Chinese tech firm to more easily reverse-engineer the original information from the encrypted data, in what seems to be “kind of an amateur mistake” by Apple, said Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer chair in telecommunications at Penn State University.
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