iPhone AirDrop message senders can now be identified as Beijing cracks Apple encryption logs،
The Chinese government says it has found a way to identify those sending messages through the iOS AirDrop feature, despite Apple's encryption. The Beijing government institute that developed the state-sponsored hacking boasted that it made police work easier by more easily identifying suspects, reports Bloomberg.
The case study that exposed the AirDrop encryption crack developed by China's forensic institute involved inappropriate messages like the one you see in the headline image sent on the subway to everyone who activated their iPhone feature respective. Beijing Wangshendongjian Forensic Evaluation Institute got to work and created a team of 10 people to apply hacking knowledge, including 6 forensic engineers and corresponding certified equipment:
Forensic technical experts from Beijing Wangshendongjian Forensic Evaluation Institute conducted in-depth analysis of iPhone device logs to clarify the transmission principle and found records related to AirDrop. Upon inspection, it was found that the fields related to the sender's device name, email address and mobile number were saved as hash values and some fields with hash values hashes were hidden. In order to quickly decrypt this field, the technical team created a detailed “rainbow table” of mobile phone numbers and email accounts, which can convert the ciphertext into the original text and quickly lock the phone number mobile and the sender's email account.
