Location Privacy and Changes in WiFi Probe Request Based Connection Protocols Usage Through Years

Jun 1, 2019·
Ante Dagelić
Toni Perković
Toni Perković
,
Mario Čagalj
DOI

Abstract

Location privacy is one of most frequently discussed terms in the mobile devices security breaches and data leaks. With the expected growth of the number of IoT devices, which is 20 billions by 2020., location privacy issues will be further brought to focus. In this paper we give an overview of location privacy implications in wireless networks, mainly focusing on user’s Preferred Network List (list of previously used WiFi Access Points) contained within WiFi Probe Request packets. We will showcase the existing work and suggest interesting topics for future work. A chronological overview of sensitive location data we collected on a musical festival in years 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018 is provided. We conclude that using passive WiFi monitoring scans produces different results through years, with a significant increase in the usage of a more secure Broadcast Probe Request packets and MAC address randomizations by the smartphone operating systems.

Type

Publication

International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech), 1–5

Status

Peer-reviewed
publications
Toni Perković
Authors
Toni Perković
Full Professor
I am a Full Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computing at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FESB), University of Split, Croatia, where I teach wireless network security, wireless communication networks, data science and reinforcement learning. My research spans information security, applied cryptography and the Internet of Things. Before returning to FESB in 2020, I was an assistant and then associate professor at the University Department of Forensic Sciences in Split. I co-founded the SpliTech international conference and serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Communications Software and Systems.