What are the chance that this keeps working long term?
Sounds awesome & makes airtags more appealing, but if apple is just going to shut it down next week then less so
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OpenHaystack has been doing this for a few years now and Apple has made no efforts to restrict it.
So what you're saying is that a decent firewall could still inspect the traffic, or the patterns thereof.
Also, this doesn't make any sense, as if Apple doesn't know which AirTag belongs to who, Find My would be very useless; and law enforcement would be furious.
Here is Apple’s docs on how they prevent themselves from inspecting traffic on Fmi: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
They must have a way to decrypt payloads or otherwise get into the system they built and control. The fact that they let law enforcement know when someone is stalking someone with an AirTag shows that the data is available to them. It’s silly to think otherwise, paper or not.
[0] https://github.com/dakhnod/FakeTag
[1] https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
[2] https://hackaday.com/2022/05/30/check-your-mailbox-using-the...
Not technically correct. Apple devices (and Android phones with the appropriate app) detect if an unknown AirTag is moving with them and makes it home, possibly signalling a stalking attempt.
The heuristics for this happen locally; Apple isn't "aware" of this happening. That said, when you first set-up an AirTag, the serial is tied to your account. Therefore, when you physically find an unknown AirTag and report it to law enforcement, they can then subpoena (or get a warrant?) Apple for information on the AirTag owner's identity.
The serial itself, and any personal identifiers, are not used in the locating process, however.
This is well documented in the paper above, in articles, as well as in reverse engineering efforts.
The tl;dr is: The information is publicly available in an encrypted form that is only readable by the party with the key.
Think of it like this, when you mark an item as lost you publish a hashed public identification key, if another device detects that key it creates a location report encrypted with your public key and posts it to a public list of encrypted reports, you decrypt the report with your private key.
Apple devices can query your AirTag's location because they sync its shared secrets through the iCloud keychain, which is used to generate temporary keys that can be use to download and decrypt the tag's location.
I see. But can't Apple simply read this data from my iCloud keychain? Or is this kind of data sharing through iCloud keychain e2e encrypted?
Over the past year only of my accounts has been banned by Apple, and I was using that one to request locations every 5-10 minutes 24/7 in Home Assistant, with no other usage of the account other than one registered hackintosh. I'm currently using another account that is querying data every 15-30 minutes, which has been working fine so far. You just need an account to anonymously download location reports, so if your throwaway gets banned just create a new one and things should work again. Just make sure to attach it to a real device or hackintosh at least once to "activate" the account's iCloud API.
I do just want to make it clear that I have no intentions on keeping this working "at all costs" - at least not without other people willing to help me out. The library is currently not even trying to be stealthy, and it can be easily detected using heuristics if they really wanted to.
If you mean from another device other than one that your keychain is on, ie, a browser on a device you haven’t logged into before, you can’t.
You can get an active location through iCloud if the device is powered on or its last location before power off if the setting is enabled. But you can’t decrypt find my location reports without the private key, which is only available in devices you’ve logged into.