Poster: Leveraging Apple's Find My Network for Large-Scale Distributed Sensing

Find My is a crowd-sourced network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to detect and track the location of items. We explore the limits and opportunities of using this proprietary network for large-scale distributed sensing. The key idea is to let low-cost sensing devices emit specially crafted BLE advertisements that trick nearby Apple devices into generating location reports that carry arbitrary sensor data, which can then be retrieved from the Apple servers. This paper reports on our ongoing work to reverse engineer the Find My system and to design a protocol for the efficient and reliable collection of data from sensing devices via the Find My network. Preliminary results from real-world experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and a several-fold performance improvement compared with the state of the art.