Open Wireless Link | Opening up Apple’s wireless ecosystem around the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) protocol.
Welcome to the Open Wireless Link (OWL) project. We are researchers from the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at TU Darmstadt looking into Apple’s wireless ecosystem. Our goal is to assess security and privacy as well as enable cross-platform compatibility for next-generation wireless applications. We started by investigating the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) protocol and will go beyond. You can read our publications and use our open source code projects. If you have questions or would like to collaborate, feel free to contact us.
Apple AirDrop allows users to send photos and other media over a direct Wi-Fi connection from one Apple device to another. As people typically want to share sensitive data exclusively with people they know, AirDrop only shows receiver devices from address book contacts by default. To determine whether the other party is a contact, AirDrop uses a mutual authentication mechanism that compares a user’s phone number and email address with entries in the other user’s address book. We discovered two severe privacy leaks in this authentication mechanism. In particular, we showed that it is possible to learn the phone numbers and email addresses of AirDrop users – even as a complete stranger. Read the full version on the project website.
Almost two years ago, Apple announced its new crowd-sourced Bluetooth location tracking system for offline devices. Meanwhile, Apple released a partial specification of its system. However, many components remained undisclosed – until now.
