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 that 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 their Lagrange Point tech enthusiast guild built a Faraday cage and a microwave jammer to spoof their location and unlock the hearing aid feature on the earbuds.

According to the group, hearing aids in India cost between INR 50,000 and INR 800,000 (approximately $600 to $9,500), putting it out of range of most users. On the other hand, AirPods Pro 2 is just half the price of the cheapest hearing aids at INR 24,900 (around $300), 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 aluminum foil outside) and then place it on top of a microwave going full blast to overpower and jam any 2.4G Wi-Fi signals in its immediate vicinity.

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They then ran a script on a MacBook that instructed the iPad to reboot and turn on its Wi-Fi antenna five minutes after that. The first few attempts failed, though, requiring the group to adjust their Faraday cage, microwave jammer, and a few restarts. But, finally, after approximately three hours of fiddling around, the Mac Console reported that the iPad is showing itself as located in the U.S. With that result, the group pulled the iPad out of the makeshift cage, connected the AirPods to the device, and the Hearing Aid setup process popped up on the screen. Success!

With proof of concept done, the group repeated the process a couple more times and built a more permanent Faraday cage. Now that they have the process down pat, they offered a hearing aid unlocking camp at Lagrange Point to allow anyone in the Bengaluru area to benefit from the feature. That way, it will allow more people to afford hearing aids without having to spend more than $500. If you’re nowhere near Lagrange Point’s office, you can recreate their detailed process and unlock the feature on your own without needing to travel there (or to a country that has the feature turned on).