The U1 chip in the iPhone 11 is the beginning of an Ultra Wideband revolutionApple likes talking about the awesome chips it designs for its iPhones, but it hates even hinting at products it hasn’t yet announced. The new U1 chip—introduced with the iPhone 11 but never mentioned on stage at Tuesday’s iPhone event—strikes at the heart of this conflict. Embedded in the U1 is new technology that may dramatically change how our various intelligent devices interact with each other, but Apple is only using it to make a small addition to AirDrop....Security through precisionThe technology works by using a method that Apple’s already using in allowing Apple Watches to unlock Macs: using the total round-trip time of a radio signal (measured in nanoseconds—radio waves move at the speed of light) to calculate how far away a device is. This prevents your Apple Watch from unlocking a Mac unless it’s in close proximity.This is an important security feature, because other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth tend to estimate distance by measuring the strength of a wireless signal, not the time it takes for it to be sent to a device and then returned back to the sender. Sneaky people could relay a signal and boost its power and fool a Bluetooth device into thinking you were nearby when you weren’t. That’s a security hole wide enough to break into a Mac or steal a car.meer ...
That’s a security hole wide enough to break into a Mac or steal a car.