iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14::“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.
tl;dr It was a bug. It is fixed in 17.1.
this is whitewashing Apple. It was introduced in iOS 14. A trillion dollar company like apple should have had this fixed long before.
Lol, and Apple didn’t even “discover” it themselves. It was 2 unaffiliated security researchers who did. Who knows if they even implemented any logic besides the UI.
If you had read the article, you would have known that the bug relates to a very specific field inside a multicast payload and a network-specific unique MAC address is generated and retained as advertised. I’m not defending Apple; just reiterating the facts.
The way multicast works is that the destination mac address starts with 01 00 5e and then next 3 octets (mac addresses are 6 octets long) are copied from the IP address lower octets. The mac address is always this when building the L2 headers for the packet.
It’s not specified what precisely is provided in the payload of the multicast body. I suspect that the original MAC address is included in something like a Bonjour broadcast, but I wasn’t able to find any documentation that confirms that.
Hmm, tldr bot didn’t mention this…
This is why we call it artificial intelligence, rather than digital intelligence.