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seemoo-lab
Can Openhaystack be used to track locations of „my“ AirTags (the original ones from Apple)?
Can Openhaystack be used to continually track the location of my AirTags? No, not for stalking. I would just love to record my AirTags positions over time and add them to a database…
Everything is possible with enough effort but I am inclined to say not really in this case without some problematic hurdles to overcome.
I agree with @Itheras. The problem is that the AirTags keys are hidden inside your macOS / iOS keychain. We know how to access them, but it is not possibel without modifying your macOS system.
What if you don't care about pairing with Apple stuff, and only want to use openhaystack?
This is a great question for folks that don't have an iOS device but would still like to use AirTags. (Because the hardware is pretty good!)
Simple answer no. But again anything can be done with enough effort but in the current state no.
The airtag keys are periodically written into a plan local file by the Mac OS findmy app - since running the proxy already requires a Mac, it shouldn't be too high of a hurdle. See section 10 in Heinrich, Alexander, Stute, Milan, Kornhuber, Tim and Hollick, Matthias. "Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apple’s Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System" Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, vol.2021, no.3, 2021, pp.227-245. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.02282.pdf
@brianr2600 The mentioned "Keys" subdirectory doesn't appear to exist in Big Sur at least.
#37 mentions a "MasterBeacons" directory, which does exist with files for each airtag, but I don't really have time to investigate if there's a way to use those.
The method of @brianr2600 would work the best. It requires you to disable some security and sandboxing features, but these files exist (as mentioned in our paper). But the issue is that Apple changes its format regularly. So at the moment, we don't have a working parser. The last parser that we created was working for macOS 10.15.4
After apple having updated their "anti-stalking" policy this becomes very interesting again. I was only using my airtags to follow my car and my bike but this seems almost completely ruined with the new firmware. A solution with custom firmware with something like https://positive.security/blog/find-you to swap public keys often seems like my only hope :D
Any updates if it's possible to track genuine AirTags with OH? Its use case has been questioned in similar posts and to be quite frank, not everyone is skilled enough to build their own. AirTag's are ready-made trackers, but not everyone has access to an iOS or Mac device.
Hi @advename , Tracking AirTags with your OpenHaystack needs way more skills than building your own trackers. That's very complicated to achieve.