Apolline Zehner (Universite libre de Bruxelles), Iness Ben Guirat (Universite libre de Bruxelles), Jan Tobias Muhlberg (Universite libre de Bruxelles)

Wireless devices, especially Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices, emit radio communication both to scan for neighboring devices and to advertise themselves. For example, a mobile phone would typically be searching for Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth devices, e.g., headsets, and advertise itself for connections. For this purpose, communication interfaces use a Medium Access Control (MAC) address which is a unique identifier to differentiate one device from another. However, the use of such unique identifiers can violate the privacy of the device and hence of the user; an attacker is able to use such unique identifiers in order to passively track a device. MAC address randomization – techniques that periodically change the MAC addresses of a device – were developed as a privacy-enhancing measure against such attacks. However research shows that this can be easily circumvented. In this paper, we survey approaches and techniques for metadata anonymization in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, as well as the de-anonymization attacks. Many of these attacks rely on physical characteristics of the communication medium and on implementation flaws of both wireless protocols and MAC address randomization protocols. We conclude by discussing open challenges both in metadata protection and deanonymization.

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Marzieh Bitaab (Arizona State University), Alireza Karimi (Arizona State University), Zhuoer Lyu (Arizona State University), Adam Oest (Amazon), Dhruv Kuchhal (Amazon), Muhammad Saad (X Corp.), Gail-Joon Ahn (Arizona State University), Ruoyu Wang (Arizona State University), Tiffany Bao (Arizona State University), Yan Shoshitaishvili (Arizona State University), Adam Doupé (Arizona State University)

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Revisiting EM-based Estimation for Locally Differentially Private Protocols

Yutong Ye (Institute of software, Chinese Academy of Sciences & Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing, PR.China.), Tianhao Wang (University of Virginia), Min Zhang (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Dengguo Feng (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

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The Midas Touch: Triggering the Capability of LLMs for...

Yi Yang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Jinghua Liu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Kai Chen (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of…

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Ghidra: Is Newer Always Better?

Jonathan Crussell (Sandia National Laboratories)

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