A 22-year-old researcher who goes by Zerotistic has shown that a Linux machine can join Apple’s Find My network and pull live location data that Apple normally reserves for its own hardware.
Find My lets families share whereabouts through iPhones and Macs, but the full experience, including people tracking, is locked to Apple devices. The researcher enrolled a Linux box into the network by completing the same identity steps an Apple device would: obtaining an identity delegate, submitting a certificate signing request in PKCS#10 format signed with a 2048-bit RSA key, and meeting Apple’s XML encoding and SHA-1 signature requirements.
Once Apple issued the IDS certificate, the machine had to subscribe to six Find My subservices and hold a persistent binary TLS connection to Apple’s private APNs servers. A SubscribeAndFetch request then pushed an encrypted location key from a friend’s device, which a custom Linux script unwrapped and decrypted.
The technique is not a way to grab anyone’s location. Apple must trust the enrolled machine, and the setup is tied to the researcher’s own Apple account and existing location shares. Still, it shows the Find My protocol can serve non-Apple clients, a finding that will interest both privacy researchers and stalkerware hunters watching the network.
