AirPods Pro hacked using Faraday cage and microwave as a jammer to fool geofencing — enthusiast activates hearing aids feature in AirPods Pro in geoblocked India

An India-based tech enthusiast who bought a pair of AirPods Pro 2 for their hard-of-hearing grandma to use as hearing aids discovered the feature is geoblocked in India due to regulatory restrictions. So, instead of throwing in the towel and calling it a day, Rithwik Jayasimha (@thel3l) and the Lagrange Point tech enthusiast guild built a Faraday cage and a microwave jammer to spoof the location and unlock the hearing aid feature on the earbuds.

According to the group, hearing aids in India cost between approximately $600 and $9,500 (INR 50,000 and INR 800,000), putting them out of the range of most users. On the other hand, AirPods Pro 2 is just half the price of the cheapest hearing aids at around $300 (INR 24,900), making it an excellent substitute for those with hearing problems. To use earbuds as hearing aids, you need to be in a country where Apple doesn’t geoblock the feature, run iOS or iPadOS 18.1 or newer, have the AirPods Pro 2, and ensure that it uses the 7B19 firmware or newer.

Although Jayasimha had all the hardware and software needed to setup the AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids, they were located in an unsupported location—India—so they decided to spoof their location and fool Apple into thinking that they’re located in the U.S. This is easier said than done, because even though they’ve spoofed the IP location and locale of the iPad they were using to setup the earbuds, the device still knows that they were in India.

After several rounds of testing and trial-and-error, one of their companions mentioned that the iPad used the SSIDs and MAC addresses that the routers around them broadcast to determine their location. So, even if the iPad didn’t have cellular and had its GPS turned off, it was still able to accurately place the region it’s in. The group then decided to put the iPad and an ESP32 board that cycles through a hundred Wi-Fi SSIDs that are located in Menlo Park, California in a makeshift Faraday cage (a cardboard box lined with…