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A Relay a Day Keeps the AirTag Away: Practical Relay Attacks on Apple's AirTags

arXiv Security Archived Apr 14, 2026 ✓ Full text saved

arXiv:2604.10138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Apple AirTags use Apple's Find My network: when nearby iDevices detect a lost tag, they anonymously forward an encrypted location report to Apple, which the tag's owner can then fetch to locate the item. That encryption protects privacy -- neither the finder nor Apple learns the owner's identity -- but it also prevents Apple from validating the correctness of received reports. We show that this design weakness can be exploited: using a relay attack

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✦ AI Summary · Claude Sonnet

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 11 Apr 2026] A Relay a Day Keeps the AirTag Away: Practical Relay Attacks on Apple's AirTags Gabriel K. Gegenhuber, Leonid Liadveikin, Florian Holzbauer, Sebastian Strobl Apple AirTags use Apple's Find My network: when nearby iDevices detect a lost tag, they anonymously forward an encrypted location report to Apple, which the tag's owner can then fetch to locate the item. That encryption protects privacy -- neither the finder nor Apple learns the owner's identity -- but it also prevents Apple from validating the correctness of received reports. We show that this design weakness can be exploited: using a relay attack, we can inject manipulated location reports so the Find My service reports a false position for a lost AirTag. The same technique can be used to deny recovery of a targeted tag (a focused DoS), since the owner is misled about its whereabouts. Comments: Presented at ACSAC 2025 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2604.10138 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2604.10138v1 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.10138 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Gabriel Karl Gegenhuber [view email] [v1] Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:07:26 UTC (3,639 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

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