apple airtags

2 Articles

An excerpt from the website, showing the nRootTag block diagram and describing its structure

Hijacking AirTag Infrastructure To Track Arbitrary Devices

March 3, 2025 by 7 Comments

In case you weren’t aware, Apple devices around you are constantly scanning for AirTags. Now, imagine you’re carrying your laptop around – no WiFi connectivity, but BLE’s on as usual, and there’s a little bit of hostile code running at user privileges, say, a third-party app. Turns out, it’d be possible to make your laptop or phone pretend to be a lost AirTag – making it and you trackable whenever an iPhone is around.

The nroottag website isn’t big on details, but the paper ought to detail more; the hack does require a bit of GPU firepower, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The specific vulnerabilities making this possible have been patched in newer iOS and MacOS versions, but it’s still possible to pull off as long as an outdated-firmware Apple device is nearby!

Of course, local code execution is often considered a game over, but it’s pretty funny that you can do this while making use of the Apple AirTag infrastructure, relatively unprivileged, and, exfiltrate location data without any data connectivity whatsoever, all as long as an iPhone is nearby. You might also be able to exflitrate other data, for what it’s worth – here’s how you can use AirTag infrastructure to track new letter arrivals in your mailbox!

Apple AirTags Hacked And Cloned With Voltage Glitching

July 14, 2022 by 34 Comments

Apple AirTags are useful little devices. They essentially use iPhones in the wild as a mesh network to tell the owner where the AirTag is. Now, researchers have shown that it’s possible to clone these devices.

The research paper explains the cloning process, which requires physical access to the hardware. To achieve the hack, the Nordic nRF52832 inside the AirTag must be voltage glitched to enable its debug port. The researchers were able to achieve this with relatively simple tools, using a Pi Pico fitted with a few additional components.

With the debug interface enabled, it’s simple to extract the microcontroller’s firmware. It’s then possible to clone this firmware onto another tag. The team also experimented with other hacks, like having the AirTag regularly rotate its ID to avoid triggering anti-stalking warnings built into Apple’s tracing system.

As the researchers explain, it’s clear that AirTags can’t really be secure as long as they’re based on a microcontroller that is vulnerable to such attacks. It’s not the first AirTag cloning we’ve seen either. They’re an interesting device with some serious privacy and safety implications, so it pays to stay abreast of developments in this area.

[Thanks to Itay for the tip!]