Chinese state-backed institute claims to have ‘cracked’ Apple’s AirDrop

A Chinese state-backed institution has devised a way to identify users who send messages via Apple’s AirDrop feature, Beijing’s government claims, “as part of broader efforts to root out undesirable content,” reports Bloomberg.

AirDrop is a proprietary wireless ad hoc service in macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS operating systems,Use AirDrop to share and receive photos, documents, and more with other Apple devices that are nearby.

The Beijing Institute claims to developed the technique to crack an iPhone’s encrypted device log to identify the numbers and emails of senders who share AirDrop content, the city’s judicial bureau said in an online post. Police have identified multiple suspects via that method, the agency said, without disclosing if anyone was arrested, according to Bloomberg.

From the online post: Because AirDrop does not need to be connected to the Internet, it cannot effectively supervise the behavior through conventional network monitoring means, which has become a major problem for public security organs to solve such cases. The Beijing Wangshen Dongjian Judicial Appraisal Institute is entrusted by the public security organ to extract and analyze the “airdrop” function records of the mobile phone sent for inspection.