Generally they iPhone they are considered the most secure smartphones available on the world market. In fact, there are several features that Apple has worked on for its iOS operating system over the years, in order to largely earn this reputation.
However, things don’t always go as advertised and declared. During the last update ad iOS 17.1 some corrections would have been made regarding the feature “private Wi-Fi address“. In some cases, in fact, iPhones inadvertently transmitted their address MAC.
According to some reports, the fix that has been implemented, concerns a vulnerability which prevented the feature capable of keeping everything private from working. The “private Wi-Fi address” feature was introduced as early as iOS 14, with developers reporting that the vulnerability would have made everything unusable by then.
Apple and security: for a long time the private MAC address was made public by iPhones
The MAC address is a string that represents the identity of that device connected to the Internet. These are 12 characters between numbers and letters that identify the hardware. The so-called Media Access Control they are permanent and static. This allows anyone to track them via the Wi-Fi network and this is why the “private Wi-Fi address” function was introduced with iOS 14.
Security experts point out that, despite this feature being active, the iPhones would continue to share the original MAC address, all while using only a field other than the designated one.
It must be said in all honesty that even in this way Apple has made it difficult to normally track an iPhone via the network. At the same time, the company failed to provide as comprehensive protection as it claimed to do.
Fortunately, the practical consequences on the average user were few to none, even if privacy was not as effective as many believed.
