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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

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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.

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[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 61 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 14 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 8 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

this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023

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