Interesting. They seem to be abusing a hole where Apple wasn't confirming that the broadcast addresses were valid for tags (ie: "random static" addresses rather

Interesting. They seem to be abusing a hole where Apple wasn't confirming that the broadcast addresses were valid for tags (ie: "random static" addresses rather than public ones). The BLE broadcast stores part of the lost message public key in the advertising message's address, and part of it in the payload -- they are just using a "normal" BLE address and then reverse-engineering a key from that. > The Find My network specification mandates the use of ran- dom static addresses for advertising lost messages. However, our research reveals that public addresses, resolvable private addresses, and non-resolvable private addresses can also serve this purpose without any issues. This implementation vulner- ability is exploited by our attack to track Linux, Android, and Windows systems. > Our work uncovered a vulnerability in the Find My ser- vice that permitted all types of BLE addresses for advertis- ing. Exploiting this vulnerability, we proposed a novel at- tack, nRootTag, which transforms a Bluetooth device into an “AirTag” tracker without requiring root privilege escalation. By utilizing over a billion active Apple devices as finders, the attack is able to accurately track user devices. Through rainbow table-based offline key search or GPU-accelerated online key search, an infected computer can be quickly turned into a tracker. Notably, the online key search cost does not in- crease as the number of tracked devices grows. The evaluation shows that the attack is effective across various devices, in- cluding desktops, laptops, smartphones, and IoT devices, and worked on Linux, Windows, and Android platforms. We also discussed how the attack could be extended to track Apple devices.