Media Access Control (MAC) address randomization is a privacy technique whereby mobile devices rotate through random hardware addresses in order to prevent observers from singling out their traffic or physical location from other nearby devices. Adoption of this technology, however, has been sporadic and varied across device manufacturers. In this paper, we present the first wide-scale study of MAC address randomization in the wild, including a detailed breakdown of different randomization techniques by operating system, manufacturer, and model of device. We then identify multiple flaws in these implementations which can be exploited to defeat randomization as performed by existing devices. First, we show that devices commonly make improper use of randomization by sending wireless frames with the true, global address when they should be using a randomized address. We move on to extend the passive identification techniques of Vanhoef et al. to effectively defeat randomization in ∼96% of Android phones. Finally, we identify a previously unknown flaw in the way wireless chipsets handle low-level control frames which applies to 100% of devices we tested. This flaw permits an active attack that can be used under certain circumstances to track any existing wireless device.

We investigate Apple's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Continuity protocol, designed to support interoperability and communication between iOS and macOS devices, and show that the price for this seamless experience is leakage of identifying information and behavioral data to passive adversaries. First, we reverse engineer numerous Continuity protocol message types and identify data fields that are transmitted unencrypted. We show that Continuity messages are broadcast over BLE in response to actions such as locking and unlocking a device's screen, copying and pasting information, making and accepting phone calls, and tapping the screen while it is unlocked. Laboratory experiments reveal a significant flaw in the most recent versions of macOS that defeats BLE Media Access Control (MAC) address randomization entirely by causing the public MAC address to be broadcast. We demonstrate that the format and content of Continuity messages can be used to fingerprint the type and Operating System (OS) version of a device, as well as behaviorally profile users. Finally, we show that predictable sequence numbers in these frames can allow an adversary to track Apple devices across space and time, defeating existing anti-tracking techniques such as MAC address randomization.

Common among the wide variety of ubiquitous networked devices in modern use is wireless 802.11 connectivity. The MAC addresses of these devices are visible to a passive adversary, thereby presenting security and privacy threatseven when link or application-layer encryption is employed. While it is well-known that the most significant three bytes of a MAC address, the OUI, coarsely identify a device's manufacturer, we seek to better understand the ways in which the remaining low-order bytes are allocated in practice. From a collection of more than two billion 802.11 frames observed in the wild, we extract device and model information details for over 285K devices, as leaked by various management frames and discovery protocols. From this rich dataset, we characterize overall device populations and densities, vendor address allocation policies and utilization, OUI sharing among manufacturers, discover unique models occurring in multiple OUIs, and map contiguous address blocks to specific devices. Our mapping thus permits finegrained device type and model predictions for unknown devices solely on the basis of their MAC address. We validate our inferences on both ground-truth data and a third-party dataset, where we obtain high accuracy. Our results empirically demonstrate the extant structure of the low-order MAC bytes due to manufacturer's sequential allocation policies, and the security and privacy concerns therein.

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Mobile device manufacturers and operating system developers increasingly deploy MAC address randomization to protect user privacy and prevent adversaries from tracking persistent hardware identifiers. Early MAC address randomization implementations suffered from logic bugs and information leakages that defeated the privacy benefits realized by using temporary, random addresses, allowing devices and users to be tracked in the wild. Recent work either assumes these implementation flaws continue to exist in modern MAC address randomization implementations, or considers only dated software or small numbers of devices. In this work, we revisit MAC address randomization by performing a cross-sectional study of 160 models of mobile phones, including modern devices released subsequent to previous studies. We tested each of these phones in a lab setting to determine whether it uses randomization, under what conditions it randomizes its MAC address, and whether it mitigates known tracking vulnerabilities. Our results show that, although very new phones with updated operating systems generally provide a high degree of privacy to their users, there are still many phones in wide use today that do not effectively prevent tracking.