TY - GEN
T1 - Defending wi-fi network discovery from time correlation tracking
AU - Cifuentes-Urtubey, Federico
AU - Kravets, Robin
AU - Vasisht, Deepak
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.
PY - 2022/6/27
Y1 - 2022/6/27
N2 - To prevent tracking a Wi-Fi device based on its MAC address, several operating systems have adopted MAC address randomization to conceal its factory-assigned address. This feature benefits users when their devices scan for networks, but a flaw arises when timing between transmissions stays consistent despite MAC address randomization in use. We present a defense mechanism, implemented with the Netlink library, against a time correlation attack for probe request packets on Wi-Fi devices. We show how adding random jitter to probe request transmissions renders a timing correlation attack infeasible to track devices during network discovery.
AB - To prevent tracking a Wi-Fi device based on its MAC address, several operating systems have adopted MAC address randomization to conceal its factory-assigned address. This feature benefits users when their devices scan for networks, but a flaw arises when timing between transmissions stays consistent despite MAC address randomization in use. We present a defense mechanism, implemented with the Netlink library, against a time correlation attack for probe request packets on Wi-Fi devices. We show how adding random jitter to probe request transmissions renders a timing correlation attack infeasible to track devices during network discovery.
KW - MAC address randomization
KW - privacy
KW - probe requests
KW - wi-fi
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85134051940&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85134051940&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3498361.3538799
DO - 10.1145/3498361.3538799
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85134051940
T3 - MobiSys 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services
SP - 591
EP - 592
BT - MobiSys 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 20th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, MobiSys 2022
Y2 - 27 June 2022 through 1 July 2022
ER -