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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 2 years ago by [M, B] 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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[–] 59 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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".

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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