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Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

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223 points stusmall | 8 comments | 28 Mar 25 13:13 UTC | HN request time: 1.229s | source | bottom
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mschuster91 ◴[28 Mar 25 14:07 UTC] No.43505607[source]▶
The interesting question is authentication/authorization - at the moment, macOS greatly simplifies this as long as both devices belong to the same Apple ID. On the opposite side, Samsung does the same.

How will that work out?

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1. bigfish24 ◴[28 Mar 25 14:23 UTC] No.43505810[source]▶
For something like AirDrop this will need to be sorted out, but already work occurred to reverse engineer this: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop

Would be cool if an open standard on auth forms on top of this.

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2. fire_lake ◴[28 Mar 25 15:09 UTC] No.43506428[source]▶
For this to succeed I think we need a C implementation that can be used by many languages and runtimes.
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3. lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 15:32 UTC] No.43506708[source]▶
How would an open implementation be compatible with this, given that Apple's implementation is based on an Apple-operated PKI?

Note that this is only a conversation about sender identification, which allows sending to a "non-world-visible" receiving device and confirmation-less sending to devices with the same iCloud account on them. Anonymous sending isn't cryptographically gated by Apple, to my knowledge.

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4. lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 15:33 UTC] No.43506720[source]▶
Not in C, please, since this is something that by definition will handle at least some unauthenticated low-level protocol traffic.
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5. ryao ◴[28 Mar 25 21:56 UTC] No.43510239[source]▶
The AWDL part is in C:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl

6. ryao ◴[28 Mar 25 21:58 UTC] No.43510252[source]▶
Their documentation suggests that is only needed by contacts only mode and they wrote some code to get the needed certificates from macOS:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/airdrop-keychain-extractor

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7. lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 22:34 UTC] No.43510582{3}[source]▶
That still requires you to have (access to) a Mac and an iCloud account.

It might be possible to reimplement the required Apple API, but as demonstrated by the iMessage/Beeper saga, they usually shut such things down pretty quickly.

8. apitman ◴[28 Mar 25 23:51 UTC] No.43511164{3}[source]▶
I'm impressed you managed to not use the R-word