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Apple AirPods Pro 2 hacked with microwave to enable hearing aid function

Apple AirPods Pro 2 hacked with microwave to enable hearing aid function
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An Indian enthusiast purchased Apple AirPods Pro 2 for his hard-of-hearing grandmother to use them as a hearing aid. He found that this feature was restricted in India.

Ritwik Jayasimha refused to give up and, along with fellow enthusiasts from Lagrange Point, created a Faraday cage and a microwave jammer to fake the headset's location and unlock the feature. Hearing aids in India cost between $600 and $9500, making them unaffordable for most. The AirPods Pro 2, priced at just $300, serves as an excellent alternative.

To utilize this feature, users must be in an appropriate region, own a device with iOS or iPadOS 18.1 or a newer OS, and ensure that the AirPods Pro 2 is operating on firmware version 7B19 or later. The enthusiast had everything except the correct location, so he decided to spoof it. However, despite altering the IP address and changing the language of the iPad used for the headset setup, the device still recognized that he was in India.

The experimenters recalled that the iPad uses SSID and MAC addresses of nearby routers for location detection. Even without cellular connectivity and with GPS turned off, it could accurately determine the region. Thus, the team decided to place the iPad and an ESP32 board, which switches between a hundred Wi-Fi SSIDs from California, into an improvised Faraday cage made from a cardboard box wrapped in aluminum foil. The setup was placed on a microwave running at full power to block any nearby Wi-Fi and cellular signals.

A script was run on a MacBook that commanded the iPad to reboot and turn on the Wi-Fi antenna five minutes later. However, the initial attempts were unsuccessful, requiring some adjustments and several reboots. After about three hours of work, the Mac console reported that the iPad was showing its location as the U.S. The experimenters extracted the iPad from the isolated box, connected the AirPods to the device, and the hearing aid setup process appeared on the screen.

After validating the concept, the group repeated the process several more times and built a more robust Faraday cage. They then offered a hearing aid unlocking service so that anyone in the Bengaluru area could benefit from this feature.

Source: Tom's Hardware

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