Open Wireless Link

Awesome work! I can recommend people interested in the iOS/Apple ecosystem to check out the Secure Mobile Networking Lab of TU Darmstadt in general. They do a lot of cool stuff in the space, a good starting point might be https://owlink.org. As a side note: I wonder what the story is on the whole AirTag hardware project. It's becoming so "delayed" that reverse engineered implementations are here before.

Ah, thanks for the correct term. I am not sure the specification is open enough for other operating systems to support it, which is what I meant. Among my acquaintances, I can count Apple users on a single hand (<1% of the people I know), which severly limits the usefulness of the network. There's OWL [1] which looks promising on Linux. I hope Android devices can get something soon. I'm still a bit confused by how Linux drives Wi-Fi radio, and what is and isn't implementable in software: could older Android devices gain support for NAN and OWL through a software update? What about old computers with old Wi-Fi cards? I first got aware of Wi-Fi NAN by chatting with neilalexander on #yggdrasil:matrix.org :) It looks promising for advertising capabilities to nearby hosts, allowing to negotiate p2p connections. [1]: https://owlink.org/

AirDrop is supposedly based on the OWL protocol, and is possible to use under Linux. Never tested it myself.. https://owlink.org/

I ran into this the other day and did a video about it - not the best quality video but shows it happening in realtime with analysis and commentary: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hra2uxx66kf7z0j/PXL_20220609_214802355_strip… The cause in this case was AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link.) Holding the Option key while clicking the Wi-Fi icon and clicking "Enable Wi-Fi Logging" and then checking /var/log/wifi.log will show AWDL scans starting and ending randomly, and when the scan is active it causes latency spikes every 1s like clockwork. Unrelated to AWDL, but if a process is requesting a Wi-Fi network scan (different from an AWDL scan), /var/log/wifi.log will also tell you the name of the process, such as "locationd" when the Location Service needs your location. (Tangential, but the locationd process rarely causes these latency spikes for me - on a default macOS install it very rarely requests scans in my experience, backed by my analysis of the log.) AWDL has to be used for things like AirDrop, so it's expected to have this latency increase while you have the AirDrop window open scanning for nearby devices / sending files to other devices. There are other uses of AWDL (AirPlay, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard at the very least)[0], but I don't know what was triggering it so actively in my case... and why it wasn't happening on my M1 Air. It also wasn't always happening in the background like this, it just started that day. The "fix" was to disable the awdl0…

Url changed from https://owlink.org, which points to this.

For those interested to read more on AWDL I've listed some interesting articles that I came across during lit review a while back A research lab from TUD worked on a project investigating Apple's wireless ecosystem Link: https://owlink.org/publications/ Also something interesting that I remembered reading closely linked to AWDL? Link: https://projectzero.google/2020/12/an-ios-zero-click-radio-proximity.h…

There is an open implementation of AWDL, see https://owlink.org/wiki/

There unfortunately is not a way to disable awdl in the UI apart from disabling bluetooth as well, which most don’t want. An increasing number of Apple services leverage awdl[1], and it’s unlikely they envision anyone wanting to turn it off. [1] https://owlink.org/wiki/ — note, not exhaustive ex: tethering also leverages awdl.

Continuity - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681 Apple Wireless Direct Link - https://owlink.org/wiki/