Researchers have discovered major Tile security flaws that could let both the company itself and a tech-savvy stalker track your location. These arise from two crucial differences between the security used for AirTags and Tile tags.
The flaw could even be exploited to allow a malicious actor to falsely frame a Tile owner for stalking, by making it appear as if one of your Tile tags is constantly in the vicinity of somebody else’s tag …
Both AirTags and Tile tags work in essentially the same way, using Bluetooth to broadcast their identity to nearby smartphones. Both also rotate the ID code used every 15 minutes so that it cannot be permanently tied to a specific tag.
In the case of AirTags, only the rotating ID code is ever broadcast by the tag, and all transmissions are encrypted.
However, security researchers found that Tile tags transmit not only the rotating ID but also their static MAC address – and that neither is encrypted. This represents a huge security vulnerability.
The Tile security flaws
Wired reports that Akshaya Kumar, Anna Raymaker, and Michael Specter of Georgia Institute of Technology found that the MAC address was broadcast alongside the ID. Unlike the ID, Tile MAC addresses never change.
The location of a tag, its MAC address, and unique ID also get sent unencrypted to Tile’s servers, where the researchers believe this information is stored in cleartext, giving Tile the ability to track the location of tags and their owners, even though the company claims it does not have this capability.
Additionally, anyone with a radio frequency scanner can intercept all of this information as it is transmitted.
Worse, the problem would not be solved if Tile stopped transmitting the MAC address. That’s because the way the company generates the rotating ID is not secure and future codes can be reliably predicted from past ones – even from a single ID.
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