d5f6e075af
Summary: Document how device identifiers are obtained and used to map apps and their running device. Reviewed By: passy, aigoncharov Differential Revision: D33431864 fbshipit-source-id: eff4475b3b5e796b58c04db872e814f3e7d5d79e
47 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
47 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
---
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id: device-identifiers
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title: Device Identifiers
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sidebar_label: Device Identifiers
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---
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import useBaseUrl from '@docusaurus/useBaseUrl';
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Flipper is capable of discovering and listing available devices for multiple platforms.
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On itself, it allows users to check for connected devices and quickly use a number of plugins:
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- Logs
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- Mobile Builds
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- Crash Reporter
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Device information, including identifiers, are obtained using either `idb list-targets --json` on iOS or
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`adb devices` on Android.
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On Flipper Desktop, apps are shown alongside the device it's running on.
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It seems a trivial problem to solve. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
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On the client side, obtaining the device identifier is a problem.
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### How does Flipper map connecting apps to their respective devices?
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Over the years, both Apple and Google have locked down their APIs so that apps can't find any value that
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could be considered unique like a MAC address, serial numbers, etc., for privacy reasons. This means there's no OS API available.
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So, to obtain this device identifier, a two-way approached had to be used.
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From the Flipper Desktop side, connected devices are discovered and listed using idb or adb as mentioned above, and it sees some tcp connections coming in from apps.
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It is during the certificate exchange process that we do the mapping from apps to device.
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In this process, an app creates and sends a CSR to Flipper Desktop alongside some other data
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including the path in the application sandbox where this CSR was originally written.
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When Flipper Desktop is processing the request, it effectively lists all possible connected devices and proceeds
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to try and pull the CSR from each device. The CSR is then compared with the one sent by the client. If there's a match,
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we have successfuly made the pairing and the device identifier is sent back to the client.
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The client receives the device identifier and uses this information for subsequent secure tcp connections.
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When a secure tcp connection is established, the device identifier is passed along and thus Flipper is able to map the connecting app to its running device.
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The diagram below depicts this process.
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