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The interesting question is authentication/authorization - at the moment, macOS greatly simplifies this as long as both devices belong to the same Apple ID. On
by mschuster91 2y ago
The interesting question is authentication/authorization - at the moment, macOS greatly simplifies this as long as both devices belong to the same Apple ID. On the opposite side, Samsung does the same.
How will that work out?
- api 2y agoVanilla P2P Wifi is amazing for the possibilities it unlocks, but unfortunately most developers can't do security to save their lives. There will be a lot of insecure apps.
- bigfish24 2y agoFor something like AirDrop this will need to be sorted out, but already work occurred to reverse engineer this: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop Would be cool if an open standard on auth forms on top of this.
- fire_lake 2y agoFor this to succeed I think we need a C implementation that can be used by many languages and runtimes.
- lxgr 2y agoNot in C, please, since this is something that by definition will handle at least some unauthenticated low-level protocol traffic.
- apitman 2y agoI'm impressed you managed to not use the R-word
- ryao 2y agoThe AWDL part is in C: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
- lxgr 2y agoHow would an open implementation be compatible with this, given that Apple's implementation is based on an Apple-operated PKI? Note that this is only a conversation about sender identification, which allows sending to a "non-world-visible" receiving device and confirmation-less sending to devices with the same iCloud account on them. Anonymous sending isn't cryptographically gated by Apple, to my knowledge.
- ryao 2y agoTheir documentation suggests that is only needed by contacts only mode and they wrote some code to get the needed certificates from macOS: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/airdrop-keychain-extractor https://github.com/seemoo-lab/airdrop-keychain-extractor
- lxgr 2y agoThat still requires you to have (access to) a Mac and an iCloud account. It might be possible to reimplement the required Apple API, but as demonstrated by the iMessage/Beeper saga, they usually shut such things down pretty quickly.
- lxgr 2y agoThat's certainly a nice feature, but in comparison to the elephant in the room, i.e. wireless file transfers between Android and iOS being completely impossible at the moment, it's completely insignificant.
- tsujamin 2y ago> wireless file transfers between Android and iOS being completely impossible at the moment P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform. Maybe I'm an edge case, but probably 90% of my Airdrop usage is between my own devices, so the platform taking care of the authentication story is of more utility than cross-platform transfers. If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal since, if the source is my phone in the first place, it's probably not a huge transfer anyway.
- mschuster91 2y ago> P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform. Yeah, via their server, which means it's slow even if you have wifi, requires valuable data credit if not, or it requires the installation of a companion app on the other device and putting the other device in the same network.