Authentication and enabling encryption is a step that is supposed to happen after the initial Fast Connect message. Of course iOS and macOS do that perfectly fine, but if an attacker decides to skip that step when connecting, the AirPods will happily continue on with the Fast Connect. This authentication step is somewhat implicit if you connect the AirPods without Fast Connect (ie. the way all non-Apple Bluetooth devices would connect), and that’s probably the reason why they forgot to add an explicit check for that in the Fast Connect code paths.
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Once connected, an attacker can do everything a legitimate device can do, listen to the microphone, play music, see and pause the music that is currently playing from another connected device, or do various things the AAP protocol can do (like changing settings, crashing the AirPods by sending badly formatted messages, and a lot more things I haven’t looked into).
Apple seemingly has tasked multiple groups inside of the company with coming up with solutions to the problems presented by files, which has led to a weird patchwork of policies, services, and OS-level features that differ on each of their platforms and each of their apps.
The company says it is has submitted both the game Fortnite, and the Epic Games Store, to Apple for notarization, as they near a launch.
“We see many parallels between Apple Intelligence and an Apple product from 40 years ago,” Yang wrote in a note to clients. “Apple is setting a new standard for hardware and software experience for a technology implementation that can appear confusing, intimidating, and jarring for an average consumer.”
The initial success of abstracting the file system away in iLife apps -- iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto -- did not translate to any resemblance of success with the a general approach in iPhone and iPad. On hindsight, this is quite a difficult thing to do when the whole world is living with files and folders.
Yes, I also understand the need to add file extensions to Mac OS X, but I am still not happy about it.
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Thanks for reading.