Apple's AWDL Protocol Plagued By Flaws That Enable Tracking and MitM Attacks

'Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol installed on over 1.2
billion Apple devices, contains vulnerabilities that enable attackers
to track users, crash devices, or intercept files transferred between
devices via man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. From a report:

These are the findings of a research project that started last year at
the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, and has recently
concluded, and whose findings researchers will be presenting later
this month at a security conference in the US. The project sought to
analyze the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol that Apple
rolled out in 2014 and which also plays a key role in enabling
device-to-device communications in the Apple ecosystem. While most
Apple end users might not be aware of the protocol's existence, AWDL
is at the core of Apple services like AirPlay and AirDrop, and Apple
has been including AWDL by default on all devices the company has been
selling, such as Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple watches, Apple TVs, and
HomePods. But in the past five years, Apple has never published any
in-depth technical details about how AWDL works. This, in turn, has
resulted in very few security researchers looking at AWDL for bugs or
implementation errors.'

-- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/19/07/30/1723254

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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