Christopher Ellis (The Ohio State University), Yue Zhang (Drexel University), Mohit Kumar Jangid (The Ohio State University), Shixuan Zhao (The Ohio State University), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

Wireless technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi are essential to the Internet of Things (IoT), facilitating seamless device communication without physical connections. However, this convenience comes at a cost—exposed data exchanges that are susceptible to observation by attackers, leading to serious security and privacy threats such as device tracking. Although protocol designers have traditionally relied on strategies like address and identity randomization as a countermeasure, our research reveals that these attacks remain a significant threat due to a historically overlooked, fundamental flaw in exclusive-use wireless communication. We define _exclusive-use_ as a scenario where devices are designed to provide functionality solely to an
associated or paired device. The unique communication patterns inherent in these relationships create an observable boolean side-channel that attackers can exploit to discover whether two devices “trust” each other. This information leak allows for the deanonymization of devices, enabling tracking even in the presence of modern countermeasures. We introduce our tracking attacks as _IDBleed_ and demonstrate that BLE and Wi-Fi protocols that support confidentiality, integrity, and authentication remain vulnerable to deanonymization due to this fundamental flaw in exclusive-use communication patterns. Finally, we propose and quantitatively evaluate a generalized, privacy-preserving mitigation we call _Anonymization Layer_ to find a negligible 2% approximate overhead in performance and power consumption on tested smartphones and PCs.

View More Papers

Automated Expansion of Privacy Data Taxonomy for Compliant Data...

Yue Qin (Indiana University Bloomington & Central University of Finance and Economics), Yue Xiao (Indiana University Bloomington & IBM Research), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University Bloomington)

Read More

Density Boosts Everything: A One-stop Strategy for Improving Performance,...

Jianwen Tian (Academy of Military Sciences), Wei Kong (Zhejiang Sci-Tech University), Debin Gao (Singapore Management University), Tong Wang (Academy of Military Sciences), Taotao Gu (Academy of Military Sciences), Kefan Qiu (Beijing Institute of Technology), Zhi Wang (Nankai University), Xiaohui Kuang (Academy of Military Sciences)

Read More

IsolateGPT: An Execution Isolation Architecture for LLM-Based Agentic Systems

Yuhao Wu (Washington University in St. Louis), Franziska Roesner (University of Washington), Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington), Ning Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis), Umar Iqbal (Washington University in St. Louis)

Read More

A Key-Driven Framework for Identity-Preserving Face Anonymization

Miaomiao Wang (Shanghai University), Guang Hua (Singapore Institute of Technology), Sheng Li (Fudan University), Guorui Feng (Shanghai University)

Read More