WhistleOut fast facts
- A macOS and iOS bug allows apps to eavesdrop on you using Siri when using AirPods or Beats.
- Apps could use this flaw to listen to Bluetooth-powered Siri conversations without asking permission.
- There is no report of hackers using this system flaw to listen in on user conversations.
- Developer Guilherme Rambo discovered and reported the flaw to Apple, which released a fix in iOS 16.1.
A security flaw has been revealed in macOS and iOS devices that use Siri with AirPods or Beats. The bug allows apps to eavesdrop on you without ever asking permission to use the microphone. In short: apps can hear you, and you’d have no idea. However, developer Guillherme Rambo found the bug and reported it to Apple, which placed an OS fix in iOS 16.1. (Make sure to update your devices!). But if Siri is not working on your iPhone, there are plenty of fixes like rebooting your handset.
So how did this happen?
Rambo noticed there wasn't a drop in audio quality when using AirPods with Siri, so he set out to investigate why that was. During his macOS testing, he found the tool he used was intercepting audio data from AirPods when using Siri, but there was no record of microphone permission in the system.
Hoping to decipher how that is possible, Rambo re-ran his program and engaged Siri simultaneously. “As soon as I did that, a firehose of hex bytes started to stream down my Terminal window,” Rambo wrote in his blog post. “Not only that, but as I spoke to Siri through my AirPods, I noticed that the bytes would change rapidly, and would settle down as I went silent again. Could it be that I was looking at audio data?”
This was troubling. It wasn’t spyware, but the security flaw allowed apps to eavesdrop fairly easily. The next factor was to determine whether the audio data was encrypted—unfortunately, that was not the case. When Rambo took the bytes and opened the raw data in audio applications, he was able to play around and hear something that resembled what he said into his microphone.
To turn it into legible audio, Rambo wrote a new app using an audio codec and was able to record audio from AirPods when using Siri. The audio files would be recorded as unencrypted .wav files, which would go to the application once the user stopped recording.
Basically, Rambo was able to record himself through Bluetooth without ever accessing the microphone. And if he could do it using this bug, so could any third-party application with Bluetooth access.
“In a real-world exploit scenario, an app that already has Bluetooth permission for some other reason could be doing this without any indication to the user that it's going on, because there's no request to access the microphone,” Rambo wrote. (Later on in his testing, Rambo was also able to circumvent Bluetooth access on macOS.)
Knowing that macOS and iOS were affected, Rambo reported the issue to Apple's security team, which began investigating. Two months later, Apple released iOS 16, which included a fix (CVE-2022-32946) for the bug, and Rambo received a bounty payment for reporting the issue.
Although this issue has been fixed—and Apple has a solid reputation for security—users should always check app permissions and ensure that third-party applications are not receiving unintended data.
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Alex Kerai
Consumer Trends Reporter
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