Hello, Penguins! We will interrupt this week’s showcase friday to bring you a breaking news story. Apple just released an update to iOS 17 that fixes a bug that has been leaking users’ Wi-Fi MAC addresses for the past three years. This is a major privacy faceplant for Apple, and it’s a cautionary tale for all closed-source giants.
The bug, reported under CVE-2023-42846 could have allowed attackers to track users’ movements by monitoring their Wi-Fi MAC addresses.
Still within a subnet. If you connect to an internet cafe Wifi, you should be more worried about your dns traffic for identifying you.
DNS tracking can be mitigated with Oblivious DoH, DNSCrypt or even a VPN.
And so on and so on. If you want to be tracked, you can be tracked, regardless of a mac address, or the hoops a user jump through to create the illusion of privacy. I can think of lots of unconventional ways to track a naive user.