English

Exploration of User Privacy in 802.11 Probe Requests with MAC Address Randomization Using Temporal Pattern Analysis

Cryptography and Security 2022-06-23 v1 Signal Processing

Abstract

Wireless networks have become an integral part of our daily lives and lately there is increased concern about privacy and protecting the identity of individual users. In this paper we address the evolution of privacy measures in Wi-Fi probe request frames. We focus on the lack of privacy measures before the implementation of MAC Address Randomization, and on the way anti-tracking measures evolved throughout the last decade. We do not try to reverse MAC address randomization to get the real ad-dress of the device, but instead analyse the possibility of further tracking/localization without needing the real MAC address of the specific users. To gain better analysis results, we introduce temporal pattern matching approach to identification of devices using randomized MAC addresses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.10927,
  title  = {Exploration of User Privacy in 802.11 Probe Requests with MAC Address Randomization Using Temporal Pattern Analysis},
  author = {Tomas Bravenec and Joaquín Torres-Sospedra and Michael Gould and Tomas Fryza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.10927},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to LBS2022 conference

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:59:46.726Z