Privacy protection and mitigation of unauthorized tracking in 3GPP-WiFi interworking networks

Rajavelsamy, R.; Das, Debabrata; Choudhary, Manoj

doi:10.1109/wcnc.2018.8377154

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Significant previous work exists related to tracking mobile devices via 802.11 Wi-Fi MAC addresses [24,30,39,50,53,55,58], tracking via cellular identifiers [40, 45, 49, 53-55, 61, 63] and attempting to correlate randomized 802.11 MAC addresses to the same physical device [47,55,64]. By contrast, our work fo-cuses on the BLE technology, and specifically uses flaws in Apple's Continuity protocol (Section 2.5) to track devices despite randomization of the Bluetooth hardware identifier.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol

Martin

Alpuche

Bodeman³

et al. 2019

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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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.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol

Martin

Alpuche

Bodeman³

et al. 2019

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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show abstract

“…In Ref. [91], the researchers presented a study of an effective privacy preserve and multiple keywords queries (PPMQs) system on the external cloud, which meets the query and location privacies preserving requirements, efficient query, LBS data scalability, and confidentiality concerning users' data. The researchers used linear quadrangle tree techniques to develop a network model for representing locations data in the status of the query and searchability of the index to improve the efficiency of their proposed scheme.…”

Section: Location Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

A comprehensive review on the users’ identity privacy for 5G networks

et al. 2022

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Fifth Generation (5G) is the final generation in mobile communications, with minimum latency, high data throughput, and extra coverage. The 5G network must guarantee very good security and privacy levels for all users for these features. Therefore, researchers have deliberated the privacy and security solution of 5G users. The 5G wireless network offers a futuristic concept that helps to solve challenges affecting previous communications generations. The key concern to many scholars in the field of mobile networking is user privacy, which is long‐term subscription identifier as International Mobiles Subscribers Identifiers (IMSIs) and short‐term subscription identifier as Temporary Mobiles Subscribers Identifiers and Cell‐Radio Networks Temporary Identifiers (TMSIs and C‐RNTIs), which are used for permanent identifying, paging, and location update. This article investigates the existing literature survey about user privacy for 5G networks, which continues the identity and location privacy. Also, it discusses most of the studies that handle user identifications in authentication, paging, and location update. This article discusses the various privacy issues in the 5G network that use IMSI in clear text or temporary identities such as TMSI & C‐RNTI with IMSI to disclose user identity privacy. This article also investigates the existing literature on user identity and location privacy and highlights the key parameters, issues, challenges, and future recommendations with potential solutions.

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“…Existing privacy research on correlating entities based on signaling behavior spans several research areas. Some methods aim to recognize multiple device identifiers as belonging to a single device by linking across network protocols, gleaning details retrieved from upper layer network protocol information [19,17,25,13,23], as well as using signaling-based spatial-temporal attributes [19]. We describe in more detail the general body of work regarding spatio-temporal modeling in Section 2.2.…”

Section: Multi-protocol Entity Resolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fusion of Mobile Device Signal Data Attributes Enables Multi-Protocol Entity Resolution and Enhanced Large-Scale Tracking

Thompson,

Cedel,

Martin

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Use of persistent identifiers in wireless communication protocols is a known privacy concern as they can be used to track the location of mobile devices. Furthermore, inherent structure in the assignment of hardware identifiers as well as upper-layer network protocol data attributes can leak additional device information. We introduce SEXTANT, a computational framework that combines improvements on previously published device identification techniques with novel spatio-temporal correlation algorithms to perform multi-protocol entity resolution, enabling large-scale tracking of mobile devices across protocol domains. Experiments using simulated data representing Las Vegas residents and visitors over a 30-day period, consisting of about 300,000 multi-protocol mobile devices generating over 200 million sensor observations, demonstrate SEXTANT's ability to perform effectively at scale while being robust to data heterogeneity, sparsity, and noise, highlighting the urgent need for the adoption of new standards to protect the privacy of mobile device users.

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Privacy protection and mitigation of unauthorized tracking in 3GPP-WiFi interworking networks

Cited by 7 publications

References 5 publications

Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol

Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol

A comprehensive review on the users’ identity privacy for 5G networks

Fusion of Mobile Device Signal Data Attributes Enables Multi-Protocol Entity Resolution and Enhanced Large-Scale Tracking

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