TagAlong: A Free, Wide-Area Data-Muling Service Built on the AirTag Protocol
Authors: 
Alex Bellon, Alex Yen, Pat PannutoAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 782 - 783
Abstract
We demonstrate how to leverage Apple's Find My protocol, most well known as the underlying protocol of the AirTag, for arbitrary data-muling. This provides a new "infrastructure-free" deployment option, where areas with frequent human activity can take advantage of this zero-cost backhaul network. While there are severe limitations (e.g. no acknowledgement channel back to the sending device), Find My-based networking could still be a highly reliable backhaul with sufficient transmission redundancy and knowledge of deployment context.
In this demo, we allow users to send arbitrary data to devices that will forward the data to the Find My network. The data is then recovered from Apple's servers and displayed on a status page. Critically, we will not deploy any of our own intermediate infrastructure and will instead rely on a sufficient density of iPhones and other Apple devices from the demo audience to backhaul data from our demo.
References
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A. Heinrich, M. Stute, and M. Hollick. Openhaystack: A framework for tracking personal bluetooth devices via apple's massive find my network. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec '21, page 374--376, New York, NY, USA, 2021. Association for Computing Machinery.
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A. Heinrich, M. Stute, T. Kornhuber, and M. Hollick. Who can find my devices? security and privacy of apple's crowd-sourced bluetooth location tracking system. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2021(3):227--245, 2021.
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Information
Published In
November 2022
1280 pages
ISBN:9781450398862
DOI:10.1145/3560905
- General Chairs:
- Jeremy Gummeson,
- Sunghoon Ivan Lee,
- Program Chairs:
- Jie Gao,
- Guoliang Xing
Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Sponsors
- SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
- SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
- SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing
- SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
- SIGBED: ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems
- SIGARCH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 24 January 2023
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- Demonstration
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Conference
SenSys '22: The 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
November 6 - 9, 2022
Massachusetts, Boston
Acceptance Rates
SenSys '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 52 of 187 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 867 submissions, 20%
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