Mind your probes: De-anonymization of large crowds through smartphone WiFi probe requests

Abstract

Whenever our smartphones have their WiFi radio interface on, they periodically try to connect to known wireless APs (networks the user has connected to in the past). This is done through WiFi Probe requests - special wireless frames that contain the MAC address of the sending device and, in most of the cases, the human-readable name-string (SSID) of the known AP. This semantic information, inherent to the network protocol, is sent in the clear and, if sniffed, can help discover important information and phenomena of people and human nature that have nothing to do with technology. In this paper we present the idea of exploiting WiFi probe requests to de-anonymize the origin of participants in large events. We make use of several, publicly available datasets containing more than 11M of probe requests collected in scenarios that are of citywide, national (two political meetings), and international religion-related relevance. We show how, by exploiting the semantic information brought by the relative WiFi probes, we are able to discover with high accuracy the provenance of the crowds in each event. In particular, the de-anonymization outcome of the two political meetings held few days before the election days in Italy match surprisingly well the official voting results reported for the two respective parties.