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If the phone is broadcasting the public key couldn't some malicious actor simply send the wrong location? Also couldn't they simply put it in a faraday bag or w
by knolax 7y ago
If the phone is broadcasting the public key couldn't some malicious actor simply send the wrong location? Also couldn't they simply put it in a faraday bag or wrap in some tin foil?
- mr_toad 7y agoI doubt they’d have to bother - I doubt that the police will do anything even if you provided them a location. I’ve never known the police to do anything about stolen property. Even stolen cars don’t seem to be investigated.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> couldn't they simply put it in a faraday bag or wrap in some tin foil? Yes, but (1) that increases the difficulty of stealing such devices and (2) doesn’t help opportunistic or stupid thieves. Nobody is claiming that Find My makes Apple products unstealable.
- vbezhenar 7y agoLocation is encrypted with key, so just faking particular location is impossible. And I guess, they'll transmit some incrementing number or timestamp to fight re-transmission attacks.
- tucif 7y agoThe nearby phone is the one encrypting its own location with the public key broadcasted, so in theory fake location is possible if you had control over the protocol in all nearby devices.
- comex 7y ago> Also couldn't they simply put it in a faraday bag or wrap in some tin foil? If you're a thief and you want the phone to stop broadcasting, AFAIK you can just turn it off (as opposed to leaving it in sleep mode). But you'll have to deal with Activation Lock, which has been around for years and makes the phone a brick without the original owner's Apple ID. The new feature, on the other hand, is more applicable to devices that are just lost, not stolen.
- askafriend 7y agoThey said during WWDC that the key would be broadcast even when your iPhone or Mac are completely shut down.
- mrb 7y agoCorrect, reverse engineering the Find My protocol or intercepting & modifying the location API should let any half-competent hacker send bogus encrypted locations to Apple's database. What's the point though? You are just hampering with someone's effort to locate their lost device. Maybe you could steal multiple devices and purposefully spoof the location of your enemy's house, and the police will show up at their door to recover the stolen devices. Seems too high-effort for too little gain to me.
- mffnbs 7y agoAlso, in my experience, the police will not do that for you. My wife had her phone stolen from her and we were able to pinpoint the exact location and provide it to the police, they said they would not act on this information. Just one small anecdote, but I can't imagine many departments taking it upon themselves to do so.
- CamperBob2 7y agoMy wife had her phone stolen from her and we were able to pinpoint the exact location and provide it to the police, they said they would not act on this information. Be sure to bring this up the next time the city asks for a tax increase for police funding.
- nfoz 7y agoTo fund them more, so that they have the capacity to handle this type of request?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]