Ian Beer
More info
- Affiliation
- Google, Project Zero
- Known for
- iOS kernel exploits, the AWDL exploit (2020)
The Project Zero researcher who showed an iPhone could be taken over by radio while sitting untouched in its owner's pocket.
Since Project Zero launched in 2014, Beer has worked mostly on XNU, Apple's kernel, and the services wrapped around it. His 2017 async_wake exploit became the foundation for a generation of iOS 11 jailbreaks — not the point, but a predictable side effect of publishing working privilege escalation code.
In August 2019 he published an analysis of five exploit chains that had sat on compromised websites for two years, owning every iPhone that visited. In December 2020 came a solo zero-click exploit against AWDL, the protocol behind AirDrop: six months, one person, and a wormable bug that could hop between phones within radio range. That was the argument — if one engineer can do it in half a year, nation states already have.