[HN Gopher] Surveilling the masses with wi-fi-based positioning ...
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Surveilling the masses with wi-fi-based positioning systems
Author : belter
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-05-27 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| spr-alex wrote:
| I work at Supernetworks where we're building secure by default
| Wi-Fi routers. Our software had the ability to assign MACs to
| interfaces for a little while now, and as a response to this
| study we've now also added MAC randomization, now in the dev
| branch, and generally available in our next release
| (https://github.com/spr-networks/super). Many cards which support
| WDS//AP-VLAN have no trouble with updating the BSSID.
|
| For use as a travel router the UI makes it simple to randomize
| both the AP BSSID/MAC as well as interfaces working as WiFi
| client stations for internet uplink.
| canadiantim wrote:
| So is bringing your own travel router while traveling the
| current best practice for securely connecting to public wifi's?
| transpute wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40494994
| SSIDName_optout_nomap
| staplers wrote:
| If you had a nice enclosure for these routers you could take a
| large share of the prosumer market and be a "privacy" version
| of unifi.
|
| As an average home user, I would love something like this
| (interface and features) but with a nicer looking hardware
| (wife tax).
| spr-alex wrote:
| Yes, We have some prototypes and will have some nice
| enclosures coming soon that we'll make available via our
| website at https://www.supernetworks.org
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Our software had the ability to assign MACs to interfaces
| for a little while now, and as a response to this study we 've
| now also added MAC randomization, now in the dev branch_ [...]
|
| Will it follow what the IEEE is proposing?
|
| * 802.11bh: Enhanced service with randomized MAC addresses
|
| * 802.11bi: Enhanced service with Data Privacy Protection
|
| * https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/data-privacy-
| and...
| spr-alex wrote:
| These amendments might not apply to BSSIDs/Access Points but
| refer to enhanced privacy features to stop the fingerprinting
| of stations as well as providing ways for APs to identify
| stations under randomization, across a complicated network.
| transpute wrote:
| Note the privacy-impaired 802.11bf: WLAN Sensing,
| https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm &
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-
| sen...
|
| _> Someone outside your home could potentially tell when
| it's vacant, or see what you are doing inside. Consider all
| the reasons someone might want to secretly track someone
| else's movements. Wi-Fi sensing has the potential to make
| many of those uses possible.. it could be used by
| corporations to monitor consumers, workers, and union
| organizers; by stalkers or domestic abusers to harass their
| victims; and by other nefarious actors to commit a variety of
| crimes. The fact that people cannot currently tell they are
| being monitored adds to the risk. "We need both legal and
| technical guardrails "..
|
| > At least 30 million homes already have some kind of Wi-Fi
| sensing available.. When the new standard comes out in 2025,
| it will allow "every Wi-Fi device to easily and reliably
| extract the signal measurements".. With Wi-Fi 7.., "the
| sensing capability can improve by one order of magnitude"..
| The committee did discuss privacy and security.. But they
| decided that while those concerns do need to be addressed,
| they are not within the committee's mandate.. Wi-Fi sensing
| is more concerning than cameras, because it can be completely
| invisible._
|
| IEEE standards are a minimum starting point for
| interoperability. Security and privacy improvements can be
| implemented in open-source code, to inform future revisions
| of IEEE standards.
| transpute wrote:
| _> we 're building secure by default Wi-Fi routers_
|
| In addition to RPi hardware, it would be helpful to support
| Rockchip RK3399 and RK3588 SoCs, since these can used with
| open-source Arm Trusted Firmware (TF-A) for secure boot, to
| ensure that only owner-authorized OS and firmware are running
| on the device.
|
| _> Many cards which support WDS //AP-VLAN have no trouble with
| updating the BSSID._
|
| Do these M.2 WiFi cards support AP/VLAN and BSSID updates?
| Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 Wi-Fi 5 Qualcomm Atheros
| QCNFA765 Wi-Fi 6
| m463 wrote:
| I think phones should have location-based wifi (and maybe
| bluetooth).
|
| Meaning, if your location is home, turn on wifi, else turn it
| off.
|
| Unfortunately apple/google/carriers have a vested interest in
| making our devices very promiscuous. (location services,
| advertising/surveillance, offload cellular, etc)
| balderdash wrote:
| That would be a great feature the only places I use WiFi
| besides home/work is the airport/plane, hotels, and
| occasionally other offices or people's homes. There is no need
| to be broadcasting driving/walking around etc.
| gruez wrote:
| This paper is about surveilling locations of APs (ie.
| hotspots), not the devices that connect to them. Thanks to MAC
| address randomization the latter is basically a non-issue.
|
| >I think phones should have location-based wifi (and maybe
| bluetooth).
|
| >Unfortunately apple/google/carriers have a vested interest in
| making our devices very promiscuous. (location services, [...]
|
| You don't see the contradiction here? You want your phones to
| have location-aware features, but right afterwards say that you
| don't want it because it makes your device "very promiscuous".
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| >> Unfortunately apple/google/carriers have a vested interest
| in making our devices very promiscuous. (location services,
| [...]
|
| > You don't see the contradiction here? You want your phones
| to have location-aware features, but right afterwards say
| that you don't want it because it makes your device "very
| promiscuous".
|
| I don't think it's a contradiction. You can have a phone that
| knows its own location without telling Google/Apple where it
| is, and that uses that information to toggle features. (I'm
| kind of skipping the cell carriers because you _do_ have to
| give them coarse location by virtue of how cell network
| work.) A device can get location by purely passive GPS
| without involving _any_ external services, but that 's a
| pretty sucky experience (slow lock, low precision)... I
| _think_ you can do AGPS without telling anyone where you are,
| though. Anyways, my point is that there is a world of
| difference between _you_ having your information /location
| and anyone else having it.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| You can set that up pretty easily with something like Automate.
| https://llamalab.com/automate/
| transpute wrote:
| This could likely be automated by tapping an NFC proximity tag
| (e.g. discarded transit card) at your door for entry/exit.
| juunpp wrote:
| > We find what appear to be personal devices being brought by
| military personnel into war zones, exposing pre-deployment sites
| and military positions.
|
| Is this verified? Does the military not ban Apple/Google personal
| trackers?
| lelandfe wrote:
| One would hope after
| https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
| gruez wrote:
| Basically any sort of Android/iOS device by default will report
| back the location of nearby APs. Given how important phones are
| (eg. for entertainment or keeping in touch), it's basically
| impossible to ban them.
| eximius wrote:
| Feels like the theatre of war where opsec literally means
| life or death _to yourself_ , you'd be willing to leave your
| device at base or faraday it or something.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Multiple militaries have had locations disclosed via Strava.
| BYOD is everywhere.
| ezconnect wrote:
| That is a known fact and widely reported to have caused
| security issues. Even in the Ukraine conflict if the Russian
| army doesn't follow protocol of NOT BRINGING your phone to
| deployment they get targeted instantly by US missiles. SIGINT
| can map phone signals showing large group of people in certain
| areas just by having your phone on and all this privacy thing
| turned off.
| croes wrote:
| Original source
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454706
|
| Related article
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40464184
| karmakaze wrote:
| On my Android 12 phone, I have the following things disabled:
| - [ ] Location - Improve location accuracy [ ]
| Wi-Fi scanning [ ] Bluetooth scanning - [ ]
| Google location accuracy - [ ] Google location history
| - [ ] Google location sharing - App-level permissions
| - Allowed all the time: None - Allowed only while using
| app: Maps, Lyft, Uber, Uber Eats
|
| What's funny is when searching "location" in settings is that the
| "Google ..." ones aren't listed and have to be hunted down
| manually under Location/Location services.
|
| I sometimes temporarily enable Location, but most often I'll just
| enter addresses manually into the apps and dismiss any requests
| for location access.
|
| Of course anything with internet access can still guess location
| based on the public IP address used to connect to any server.
| Maybe a VPN could help, but then you have to trust that party
| too.
| blueflow wrote:
| Be 100% sure by leaving your smartphone at home. Checking
| WhatsApp & Co once daily is enough.
| dannyw wrote:
| This just isn't practical for anyone with kids, etc.
| dark-star wrote:
| I wonder how people checked in on their kids in the 90s,
| before smartphones were a thing?
|
| /s
| cornflake23 wrote:
| Tried it, alas, without success -Two big factors: 1. the
| infrastructure that made this possible in the 90s isn't
| there anymore (at least in my part of the world). 2. The
| surrounding world requires information exchange at
| physical boundaries. These too have now been "digitized".
|
| Where might we turn to?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Checking WhatsApp & Co once daily is enough.
|
| That is _strongly_ dependent on your social circles, and is
| also a rather small subset of what smartphones are used for.
| dirkmakerhafen wrote:
| Wait what, this was not public knowledge?
|
| I have been using apple geolocation api for the last 6-7 years to
| regularly download a snapshot of all access points in the world.
|
| https://github.com/dirk-makerhafen/apple-bssid (the basic request
| code, not the mass downloader part)
| inasio wrote:
| Nitpick: Figure 2 should have been loglog, rather than semilog-y,
| I would love to see more details rather than the near vertical
| line (graph is Cumulative geo-located BSSIDs as a function of the
| number of API queries)
| datahack wrote:
| Has nobody ever heard of Google sidewalk or what?
| _trampeltier wrote:
| There is, since ever, a website with wifi routers and location
|
| https://www.wigle.net/
| transpute wrote:
| "Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag", 100 comments,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430603
|
| _> In late March 2024, Apple quietly updated its website to note
| that anyone can opt out of having the location of their wireless
| access points collected and shared by Apple -- by appending
| "_nomap" to the end of the Wi-Fi access point's name (SSID).
| Adding "_nomap" to your Wi-Fi network name also blocks Google
| from indexing its location..
|
| > "You may not have Apple products, but if you have an access
| point and someone near you owns an Apple device, your BSSID will
| be in [Apple's] database," he said. "What's important to note
| here is that every access point is being tracked, without opting
| in, whether they run an Apple device or not.. Commonly used
| travel routers compound the potential privacy risks..
|
| > The Google/Apple opt out (_nomap) needs to be at the end of
| SSID name. Whereas the Microsoft opt out (_optout) can be
| anywhere in the SSID name. Therefore, to opt out of both, it
| would be in this order: SSIDName_optout_nomap_
| canadiantim wrote:
| Very very useful info, thank you
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