A crafty developer has reverse engineered Apple’s private keys for the AirPort Express, a situation which could allow music streaming in new ways that Apple’s existing AirPlay doesn’t currently allow.
MacRumors is reporting that developer James Laird has successfully cracked Apple’s private keys for the AirPort Express, publishing an open source software-based emulator from the box called Shareport.
“This program emulates an Airport Express for the purpose of streaming music from iTunes and compatible iPods. It implements a server for the Apple RAOP protocol,” Laird explains.
The developer initially set out to find an AirPort Express emulator, which is when he discovered that Apple uses a private key in the device itself. As any enterprising hacker would do, he took the AirPort Express part, “dumped the ROM, and reverse engineered the keys out of it.”
The discovery means that users can now stream to third-party software and hardware, although it’s unlikely that we’ll actually see any hardware manufacturers take advantage of this when it’s easier to simply license the AirPlay technology to begin with. However, software solutions are far easier to implement.
“iTunes music , for example, could be streamed to other Macs, non-Macs, customized consoles (Xbox 360), or mobile devices with the right software,” MacRumors notes. “The developer originally posted the key to the VideoLan developer mailing list in case there was interest in adding that feature to a future version of VLC.”
However, Apple likely won’t be happy to see such a discovery, although there’s not much they can do it about it -- short of updating the private key in future AirPort Express models.
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(Image courtesy of MacRumors)
