Researchers say tile tracking labels can be abused by ITS
Tile tracker, used According to Tile’s parent company, Life360 is used to find everything from missing keys to stolen pets, more than 88 million people worldwide. But researchers who have examined tracking technology have found design defects that make stalkers – or potentially make the manufacturer – the location of tile users and their devices, contrary to the claim that the company has created the security and privacy of its devices.
Researchers-Akshaya Kumar, Anna Raymaker, and Michael Specter from the Georgia Institute of Technology-given that each label broadcasts a MAC address without encryption and unique ID that can be selected by other Bluetooth devices or frequency radio antennas. The label location, its MAC address and unique ID are also sent to tile servers without encryption, where the researchers believe that this information is stored in CleartText and allows the tile to track the location of labels and their owners, even if the company claims to be unable.
Researchers say this allows tile to “extend extensive supervision” to its users and potentially provide this information to law and others.
The researchers also found that the protection of the tile’s anti -justification could be easily weakened if a stuntman enables an anti -theft feature that the tile offers with its labels. In addition, one can falsely frame their tiles as a tile owner by recording without encryption players and re -broadcast these players in the vicinity of another tile user, and the former appears to be miserable.
Researchers reported their findings to the parent company Tile, Life360 last November, but they say the company stopped communicating with them in February. Wired Life360 sent an email to respond to topics raised by the researchers, but the spokesman sent a response that did not explicitly fix the problems. The email only said that the company has made “multiple progress” researchers since receiving the report of the researchers, without specifying what.
The tile sells independent labels, but its tracking technology is also embedded in laptops, headphones, smart watches and other products made by companies such as Dell, Boase and Fitbit. Researchers reversed the Android protocol and mobile application using Tile Mate, the company’s most popular tracker label. They say their findings may not be applied to other models of tile tags or tile technology used in products made by third parties.
How do tile tags work
Tile trackers work similarly to track labels made by Apple, Google and Samsung. But the tile system is different in important ways. Like others, they are battery tile labels and use Bluetooth to play their location to the user’s phone. Users can pull a label to a bag, luggage or vehicle or attach it to keys, telephones, laptops or even pet collar to track the location.
Each tile tag plays the MAC address of the label and a unique ID, which changes periodically. If a paired case does not lose the owner, using its tile program, it can order the label to publish the sound to find it. For farther cases, this system relies on the network of phones owned by other tile users. They also choose to play each tile near them. And since 2021, ring cameras, echo devices and tile labels have been merged into the Amazon pavement, meaning that ring and echo devices can also select the location of tile labels.
