Today, the same research team published a second paper where they extended their original work to show how additional details like phone numbers and email addresses can also be recovered.

In 2019, this research team published a first paper where they described various methods to recover details from an AirDrop connection, such as phone status, WiFi status, OS version, buffer availability, and others. Apple has known of these issues since May 2019 To protect the data from being intercepted, Apple scrambles these details with a SHA256 hashing function.īut academics from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany said that if AirDrop is enabled on an Apple system, the device broadcasts these discovery packets in all directions and at all times.Ī threat actor in close physical proximity (Bluetooth range) to a target can use an off-the-shelve WiFi card to intercept these messages and then crack parts of the hashed data to recover various personal details. Under the hood, the Apple devices exchange AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link) packets that contain information about the devices and their owners, such as technical specs and personal data, including phone numbers, Apple IDs, or email addresses. The two bugs reside in the authentication process during the initial phase of an AirDrop connection, where devices try to discover each one another and determine if they belong to users who know each other (by checking if a device/user's phone number is in the other device's contacts list). A team of academics from a German university said it discovered two vulnerabilities that can be abused to extract phone numbers and email addresses from Apple's AirDrop file transfer feature.

Air drop pdf