Apple’s popular AirDrop feature for sharing files may be vulnerable to hacking attempts, according to security researchers at a German university. In a post published Friday, researchers at Technische Universitat Darmstadt said that a nearby stranger could discover the phone number and email of an AirDrop user because of a privacy gap in the feature.
The issue, reported earlier by Gizmodo, apparently stems from the Contacts Only option in AirDrop, which uses a “mutual authentication mechanism” to check whether a user’s phone number and email is in someone else’s contacts list, according to the researchers. The information is encoded in hash during this process, but a bad actor in “physical proximity to a target” could pick up the information and quickly reverse the privacy measures using “simple techniques such as brute-force attacks,” said the researchers.
Source: CNET | By: Ty Pendlebury| April 23, 2021| https://www.cnet.com/news/airdrop-could-be-hacked-to-reveal-personal-information-researchers-suggest/
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