Oliver Haslam on May 13, 2021, 12:45 am

Apple’s Find My Network Has Been Used To Send Messages To A Mac

Apple’s AirTag has been around for less than two weeks and the Find My network, open as it is now, hasn’t been around all that much longer. But despite all of that someone has already been able to create a fake AirTag and use it to send arbitrary text across the Find My network.

Security researcher, Fabian Bräunlein, is the person who has made it all happen and he has written about the whole thing on his blog.

There’s a lot to dig into there, but it boils down to emulating the way an AirTag connects to the Find My network via an encrypted broadcast.

The demonstration provided shows strings of text being sent from a fake AirTag to a macOS device using a data retrieval app. It’s all super impressive and we’re told that it isn’t thought Apple will be able to easily stop this from happening because of the encrypted nature of the messages being sent back and forth.

On a positive note, it isn’t expected that this could be used in any particularly malicious way. That being said, Apple’s Find My network consists of millions of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches and who knows what someone could come up with in the future.

We’d definitely suggest checking out the full blog post about how this all went down. Especially if you’re interested in the technical details.