from Hacker News

Marauder’s Map: Sniffing MAC addresses in the MIT wireless network [pdf]

by phwd on 8/23/16, 10:08 AM with 9 comments

  • by jswrenn on 8/23/16, 6:20 PM

    The characterization of the adversary here being some malicious third party, though traditional, is something of a bogeyman as far as actual risk is concerned. Institutions running large mesh networks are in a privileged position to track users in this way.

    At Brown University, complete connection logs for each wireless access point have been kept for no less than two years. A group of students last year were given this data and produced a (historical) map of student movement. There is no reason to believe that the University could not or is not rendering such a map in real-time.

  • by Kadin on 8/23/16, 6:18 PM

    Neat idea.

    As a general aside, when publishing documents that start off as LaTeX, putting them on Github (or some other Git hosting service) would potentially allow others to contribute corrections. There are a bunch of typos in the paper that would be trivial to correct, but of course there's no easy way to submit corrections to a PDF.

  • by wyldfire on 8/23/16, 9:57 PM

    Narry a "solemnly swear" nor "mischief managed" to be found in the entire paper. Tsk.

  • by dstyvsky33 on 8/23/16, 5:53 PM

    I have made something at least similar.

    There is another post on my site about integrating live visualization with D3 as well.

    I found that the metadata pertaining to signal strength to be too variable based on device manufacturer to be accurately used for a distance calculation without a lot of individual fine tuning or at the very least triangulation.

    Triangulation runs into its problems though because of the inaccuracies of usb timing.

    http://www.coderecon.com/pages/post_4

  • by borgel on 8/23/16, 6:41 PM

    Interestingly, Apple has already started randomizing MAC addresses [1] on iOS (8?) and newer devices. Though maybe not quite as successfully as it seemed at first.

    [1] http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization