Abstract
The user privacy, in particular, user tracking, has always been a considerable concern, and moreover nowadays, when we are completely surrounded by Wi-Fi enabled devices (smartphones, tablets, wearables, etc.). These devices transmit unique unencrypted signals containing information which includes a device’s MAC (Media Access Control) address. Such signals can be monitored with a passive attack by using cheap hardware. Since the MAC address is unique for each device, there is an unquestionable privacy threat to the devices’ owners. To this moment, the only countermeasure vendors have the MAC Address Randomization. In this paper, we show that the effectiveness of this solution, five years after it was introduced for the first time, is insufficient to prevent Wi-Fi users from tracking. Moreover, the solution itself is not even widely used.
To validate such conclusions, we have conducted a week-long passive attack using Single Board Computer (Raspberry PI), and we were able to obtain real-world sample data (7.522 total wireless probe requests). Thus, we were being able to: analyze data and count users, notify their presence measure time they spent in an area, determine the working hours and the busiest day, distinguish vendors, etc.
The paper also suggests mitigations, including some that may affect the MAC Randomization implementation itself as well as the user behavior.
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Vasilevski, I., Blazhevski, D., Pachovski, V., Stojmenovska, I. (2019). Five Years Later: How Effective Is the MAC Randomization in Practice? The No-at-All Attack. In: Gievska, S., Madjarov, G. (eds) ICT Innovations 2019. Big Data Processing and Mining. ICT Innovations 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33110-8_5
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