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22
Signals from the Crowd: Uncovering Social Relationships through Smartphone Probes
"... The ever increasing ubiquitousness of WiFi access points, cou-pled with the diffusion of smartphones, suggest that Internet every time and everywhere will soon (if not already has) become a re-ality. Even in presence of 3G connectivity, our devices are built to switch automatically to WiFi networks ..."
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The ever increasing ubiquitousness of WiFi access points, cou-pled with the diffusion of smartphones, suggest that Internet every time and everywhere will soon (if not already has) become a re-ality. Even in presence of 3G connectivity, our devices are built to switch automatically to WiFi networks so to improve user ex-perience. Most of the times, this is achieved by recurrently broad-casting automatic connectivity requests (known as Probe Requests) to known access points (APs), like, e.g., “Home WiFi”, “Campus WiFi”, and so on. In a large gathering of people, the number of these probes can be very high. This scenario rises a natural ques-tion: “Can significant information on the social structure of a large crowd and on its socioeconomic status be inferred by looking at smartphone probes?”. In this work we give a positive answer to this question. We or-ganized a 3-months long campaign, through which we collected around 11M probes sent by more than 160K different devices. Dur-ing the campaign we targeted national and international events that attracted large crowds as well as other gatherings of people. Then, we present a simple and automatic methodology to build the un-derlying social graph of the smartphone users, starting from their probes. We do so for each of our target events, and find that they all feature social-network properties. In addition, we show that, by looking at the probes in an event, we can learn important sociolog-ical aspects of its participants—language, vendor adoption, and so on.
Short Paper: WifiLeaks: Underestimated Privacy Implications of the
"... On Android, installing an application implies accepting the permissions it requests, and these permissions are then en-forced at runtime. In this work, we focus on the privacy im-plications of the ACCESS_WIFI_STATE permission. For this purpose, we analyzed permissions of the 2700 most popular applic ..."
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On Android, installing an application implies accepting the permissions it requests, and these permissions are then en-forced at runtime. In this work, we focus on the privacy im-plications of the ACCESS_WIFI_STATE permission. For this purpose, we analyzed permissions of the 2700 most popular applications on Google Play and found that the ACCESS-_WIFI_STATE permission is used by 41 % of them. We then performed a static analysis of 998 applications requesting this permission and based on the results, chose 88 appli-cations for dynamic analysis. Our analyses reveal that this permission is already used by some companies to collect user Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We also conducted an online survey to study users ’ perception of the privacy risks associated with this permission. This survey shows that users largely underestimate the privacy implications of
Analysing the privacy policies of wi-fi trackers
- in Proceedings of the 2014 workshop on physical analytics. ACM
"... Wi-Fi-based tracking systems have recently appeared. By collecting radio signals emitted by Wi-Fi enabled devices, those systems are able to track individuals. They basi-cally rely on the MAC address to uniquely identify each individual. If retailers and business have high expectations for physical ..."
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Wi-Fi-based tracking systems have recently appeared. By collecting radio signals emitted by Wi-Fi enabled devices, those systems are able to track individuals. They basi-cally rely on the MAC address to uniquely identify each individual. If retailers and business have high expectations for physical tracking, it is also a threat for citizens pri-vacy. We analyse the privacy policies used by the current tracking companies then we show the pitfalls of hash-based anonymization. More particularly we demonstrate that the hash-based anonymization of MAC address used in many Wi-Fi tracking systems can be easily defeated using of-the-shelf software and hardware. Finally we discuss possible solutions for MAC address anonymization in Wi-Fi tracking systems.
lyon.fr
, 2015
"... HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte p ..."
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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
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"... Abstract — This paper presents the survey of the modern indoor positioning technologies and systems. We discuss Wi-Fi and Bluetooth based positioning systems, light-based and magnetic field systems. It is our first attempt to classify indoor positioning techniques. We try to highlight the advantages ..."
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Abstract — This paper presents the survey of the modern indoor positioning technologies and systems. We discuss Wi-Fi and Bluetooth based positioning systems, light-based and magnetic field systems. It is our first attempt to classify indoor positioning techniques. We try to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of various indoor positioning technologies and systems, compare their accuracy, applicability, working principles and performance parameters. Keywords—indoor positioning, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, light, magnetic, inertial navigation. I.
Routers
, 2015
"... HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte p ..."
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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Copyright
TO LOCALISE OR TO BE LOCALISED WITH WIFI IN THE HUBEI MUSEUM?
"... ISPRS The first method detects the beacon frames send by smartphones, laptops and other WiFi enabled devices in range using Libelium Meshlium Xtreme monitors. Their MAC addresses and the signal strength is measured by the Meshlium Xtreme and stored on an external database. We call this method WiFi ..."
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ISPRS The first method detects the beacon frames send by smartphones, laptops and other WiFi enabled devices in range using Libelium Meshlium Xtreme monitors. Their MAC addresses and the signal strength is measured by the Meshlium Xtreme and stored on an external database. We call this method WiFi monitoring. The second method a Wifi enabled device, like a smartphone, measures the signal strength of multiple Wifi Access Points in range to localise itself based on a previously created radio map. This method is known as WiFi fingerprinting. Both methods have some advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of the common way of WiFi fingerprinting are that the implementation costs are relatively low, because it is usually possible to use (a part of) the existing WiFi AP infrastructure. WiFi fingerprinting can reach a relatively high accuracy in the order of magnitude of meters. Finally, the location granularity can be adjusted to what is necessary for the purpose of the indoor localisation. This makes it employable for a wide range of purposes. The question remains how suitable these methods are for a 3D indoor navigation system for the Hubei provincial museum. One important aspect is the localisation-granularity necessary for the application. In a museum it is not necessary to know the exact X,Y position of a user (such high accuracy is unnecessary), more important is to know in which room the user is located so the information on exhibitions can be presented and the starting point of the navigation can be determined. Both methods can track the user and tell the room he or she is located at. Although WiFi smartphone monitoring may have a low update frequency it is still suitable for a navigation system for a museum since visitors usually spend more than a couple of minutes within a room.
Digital Terrestrial Tracking: The Future of Surveillance
"... ABSTRACT In this paper, the terms Digital Terrestrial Tracking (DTT) and Digital Terrestrial Footprint (DTF) are introduced. The DTF defines the uniquely identifiable signature of wireless signals emitted by a device or collection of devices that an individual carries on their person in the physica ..."
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ABSTRACT In this paper, the terms Digital Terrestrial Tracking (DTT) and Digital Terrestrial Footprint (DTF) are introduced. The DTF defines the uniquely identifiable signature of wireless signals emitted by a device or collection of devices that an individual carries on their person in the physical world. These signals can reveal a device's history at a location and point in time, and potentially disclose details about the owner. Interrogation or interaction with the device may reveal further details. The DTF positions itself between an individual's physical world footprint (their unique personal attributes), and their online footprint (defined by their unique online persona). Physical world tracking would involve following a person based on what they look or sound like; online tracking would involve tracking a person online activity based on their unique online signature (cookies, IP addresses, social media accounts); and digital terrestrial tracking involves tracking a person in the real world based on a unique signature emitted by devices on their person. The goal of the research conducted and discussed in this paper was to build a mass data collection and correlation framework based on information leaked from the wireless devices that people carry. The framework should be able to identify, track, and profile people by passively collected wireless information from devices, and collect information that is more verbose by optionally interrogating devices. The result is a tool, named Snoopy, written in Python, capable of operating in a distributed manner, in harsh environments on affordable off the shelf (OTS) hardware. Snoopy is able to draw specific and high level conclusions about individuals based on their digital wireless signals. The framework has been extensively tested in busy public areas (such as conferences, airports, hotels, etc.) and validated our hypothesis that such tracking was possible. Analysis performed against the collected data revealed interesting insights and trends, which will be discussed in the results section of this paper.
Experimenting with Commodity 802.11 Hardware: Overview and Future Directions
, 2015
"... The huge adoption of 802.11 technologies has triggered a vast amount of experimentally-driven research works. These works range from performance analysis to protocol enhancements, including the proposal of novel applications and services. Due to the affordability of the technology, this experimenta ..."
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The huge adoption of 802.11 technologies has triggered a vast amount of experimentally-driven research works. These works range from performance analysis to protocol enhancements, including the proposal of novel applications and services. Due to the affordability of the technology, this experimental research is typically based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, and given the rate at which 802.11 releases new standards (which are adopted into new, affordable devices), the field is likely to continue to produce results. In this paper, we review and categorise the most prevalent works carried out with 802.11 COTS devices over the past fifteen years, to present a timely snapshot of the areas that have attracted to most attention so far, though a taxonomy that distinguishes between performance studies, enhancements, services and methodology. In this way, we provide a quick overview of the results achieved by the research community that enables prospective authors to identify potential areas of new research, some of which are discussed after the presentation of the survey.
A Pedestrian Flow Analysis System using Wi-Fi Packet Sensors to a Real Environment ACM Classification Keywords K.6.4 [MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS]: System Management- Quality assurance
"... Abstract The authors have been developing the system, which analyzes pedestrian flow using Wi-Fi packet sensors. The sensors collect Wi-Fi packet called probe request packet, which is transmitted from a smartphone to search Wi-Fi access points. In addition, the cloud storage server is running to ma ..."
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Abstract The authors have been developing the system, which analyzes pedestrian flow using Wi-Fi packet sensors. The sensors collect Wi-Fi packet called probe request packet, which is transmitted from a smartphone to search Wi-Fi access points. In addition, the cloud storage server is running to manage observed packets centrally and to compute pedestrian flow in real time. Additionally, user movement history is vitally important and we have to pay close attention to handling that kind of data. Therefore, the system runs with an anonymization method and a cryptographic function. Some kinds of demonstration experiments were held in real environment. As a result, it was confirmed that we can analyze the rough tendency of pedestrian flow using the present system and simple analysis methods.
