In a significant breach of Apple’s privacy measures, a new report says that AirDrop was cracked by the Chinese government,...
The Beijing institute developed the technique to crack an iPhone’s encrypted device log to identify the numbers and emails of senders who share AirDrop content, the city’s judicial bureau said in an online post. Police have identified multiple suspects via that method, the agency said, without disclosing if anyone was arrested.
“It improves the efficiency and accuracy of case-solving and prevents the spread of inappropriate remarks as well as potential bad influences,” the bureau said.
Or China is just saying they cracked Air Drop to try to scare protestors from using this feature. If they cracked it, why would they make it public that they cracked it when they could catch dissidents using it without their knowledge? Not to mention making it public puts pressure on Apple to patch it, which would destroy their access. Doesn’t make much sense to make this public if it is true.
Whenever a government or government agency announces a successful exploit, I presume they've already exhausted it and moved on to another one that won't be patched or publicly divulged for many years.
You can still have more certainty or less. If it's open-source - it doesn't guarantee safety by any means, sure, but if it's proprietary like this one - you don't even get a chance to check what's going on.
Even when it's open source: how do you prove something is not "hackable"?
You need to know the exploit before you can evaluate whether something is secure against it or not. If you don't know what it is, how can you be sure whether you are affected by it or not.
Nothing is ever completely secure if it's connected to the internet. It just likely isn't worth it to hack into. That's why macs used to be "virus proof".
Well, yes, because Windows was a much more lucrative target.
If I told you I know of a way by which I can "hack" the lock of your house to enter it, how can you prove whether I'm lying or not? Specially if I'm not willing to show you how I do it, and I haven't given you any proof of having actually done it that you can try to dispute.
They aren't saying that the email/number is part of the message. What the are saying is that they are able to decrypt the logs in order to identify the senders .
It could be they cross-reference matching some internal ids / tokens / physical addresses of the devices together with all the data the Chinese government already has (or can obtain) ...or it could be a bluff.. who knows... there's not enough information, and what we know is probably distorted.