Presented at
DEF CON 33 (2025),
Aug. 9, 2025, 1 p.m.
(45 minutes).
Apple Find My is a crowdsourced offline tracking network designed to assist in recovering lost devices while maintaining privacy. By leveraging over a billion active Apple devices, it has become the world's largest device-locating network. While prior research has demonstrated the possibility of creating DIY trackers that attach to the Find My network, they are mainly for personal use and do not pose a threat for remote attacks. Recently, we found an implementation error in the Find My network that makes it vulnerable to brute-force and rainbow table attacks. With a cost of a few US dollars, the exploit turns computers into trackers without requiring root privileges. We are concerned that adversaries and intelligence agencies would find this exploit handy for user profiling, surveillance, and stalking. This demo is especially appealing to those interested in Find My network and Bluetooth tracking technologies. We will review how Find My offline finding works, elaborate in detail about our discoveries, techniques to make practical attacks, and provide source code for fun.
Presenters:
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Junming "Chapoly1305" Chen
Junming is a PhD student at George Mason University. He works on IoT security and was previously a full-time security engineer in the electric automotive industry. He has a CompTIA Security+ certificate like everybody. He supports the Rizin Reverse Engineering Framework. This will be his first time presenting at DEF CON.
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Qiang Zeng
Qiang received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Beihang University and his PhD degree from Penn State University. He is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science with George Mason University. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. His main research interest is computer systems security, with a focus on cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, and mobile computing. He also works on adversarial machine learning.
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