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One of the most intriguing changes in iOS 13 and MacOS 10.15 is a merged Find My Friends and Find My iPhone application. The new app converts all your Apple devices into Bluetooth tags, allowing you to locate an offline device based on its proximity to any other Apple device. Apple now offers a little more details about the security features of the Find My application.
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Here's how Apple describes offline location support in the new Find My Application app:
Locate a missing device even if it is not connected to Wi – Fi or to a cellular network with the help of a location from the crowd. When you mark your device as missing and another Apple device is nearby, it can detect your device's Bluetooth signal and tell you where it is. It's completely anonymous and encrypted end-to-end, so everyone's privacy is protected.
Craig Federighi, on the WWDC scene on Monday, explained that all the interaction involved in Find My's offline mode is "encrypted and anonymous from start to finish". Apple has provided more details on the security aspect of Wired features this week.
One of the most interesting elements of this piece is that the feature search feature of iOS 13 offline devices requires that you own two Apple products. This second Apple product is essentially the one that contains the key to decrypt the location of an offline device:
Apple has broken down this element of privacy by explaining how its "encrypted and anonymous" system prevents leakage of your location data, even when your devices are broadcasting a Bluetooth signal that is explicitly designed to allow you to track your device.
It turns out that the solution to this paradox is a trick that requires to own at least two Apple devices. Each of them emits an ever-changing key used by nearby Apple devices to encrypt and upload your location-based data, so that only the other Apple device you own has the key to decrypt those locations.
In addition, Find My's cryptography prevents even Apple from knowing the location of a user through Bluetooth beacon technology. It is actually an improvement over the individual Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps.
Here's how cryptography should work in the real world:
When you want to recover your stolen laptop, you switch to your second Apple device – say an iPad – which contains the same private key as the laptop and has generated the same series of rotating public keys. When you press a button to find your laptop, the iPad sends the same hash of the public key to Apple as the identifier, so that Apple can browse its millions and millions of encrypted locations stored and find the corresponding hash.
The full article of Wired is definitely worth reading.
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