News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead. Parent comment

Re:Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggestin... by jwells89 on Thursday December 14, 2023 @09:47PM (#38650592)
My understanding is that the serials represent information, including model and date/location of manufacture. It’s therefore possible to create correctly formed but impossible serials, for example one that represents a pre-touchbar 2015 MBP manufactured in Ireland in 2018.

Apple should easily be able to tell when someone has done this.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggestin... by turquoisevar on Thursday December 14, 2023 @10:08PM (#38650717)
They indeed used to have data like that encoded in it.

Not too long ago, however, they moved to a completely randomized serial format, perhaps partly because of iMessages shenanigans.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggestin... by nneonneo on Thursday December 14, 2023 @11:47PM (#38651083)
iMessage seems to use quite a lot of information from the hardware aside from the serial number. See https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/emulated/data... for the data that is used to calculate the "validation blob" to activate iMessage. Several of the keys (not values!) are random-looking gibberish like "kbjfrfpoJU" and "oycqAZloTNDm", while others are normal things like "product-name" and "IOPlatformUUID".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggestin... by turquoisevar on Friday December 15, 2023 @12:14AM (#38651228)
Those random looking keys are derived from the hardware and together with the values they serve as seeds for some of the keys.

Server-side there’s a bunch more information used from the Apple ID.

Together it results in a score and the server then decides if it meets the threshold before deciding to play nice.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggestin... by rezonant on Thursday December 14, 2023 @10:41PM (#38650735)
Hmm, how many bits of entropy are in one of these things? Can we calculate the likelihood of collision?
[ Parent | on HN ]