Black Hat US: Multipeer Connectivity Presentation

Earlier this week, Alban Diquet was speaking at the Black Hat US conference in Las Vegas. The topic of Alban’s talk was the Multipeer Connectivity Framework Apple introduced in iOS 7, which “provides support for discovering services provided by nearby iOS devices […] and subsequently communicating with those services by sending message-based data, streaming data, and resources (such as files).” This Framework will also be available on Mac OS X starting with Mac OS X Yosemite, which will be released in a month or so.

The slides for the presentation are now available for download. They provide a detailed analysis of Multipeer Connectivity’s inner workings, which was performed through reverse engineering of this undocumented protocol. The Framework’s security settings (encryption and authentication) are also explained in details, with information useful to both App developers and security researchers regarding the actual security provided by each setting.