Reverse Engineering and Evaluating the Apple Wireless Direct Link Protocol

Abstract

Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) is a proprietary protocol deployed in about 1.4 billion1 end-user devices consisting of Apple's main product families such as Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV? effectively all recent Apple devices containing a Wi-Fi chip. Apple does not advertise the protocol but only vaguely refers to it as a "peer-to-peer Wi-Fi" technology [2]. Yet, it empowers popular applications such as AirDrop and AirPlay that transparently use AWDL without the user noticing. We believe that public knowledge of this undocumented protocol would be beneficial for the following reasons.