Communications of the ACM
Wi-Fi Sniffing Lets Researchers Take Social Snapshots of Crowds
Researchers have used Wi-Fi probe requests from smartphones to take social snapshots of crowds.
Credit: Wi-Fi Alliance
Sapienza-Universita di Roma researchers have used Wi-Fi probe requests from smartphones to take a social snapshot of large gatherings of people. Over a three-month period, the researchers collected more than 11 million probes from about 165,000 individual devices.
The operating systems of wireless devices can include a preferred network list (PNL), which incorporates some of the SSIDs of Wi-Fi networks the device has previously connected to, and some devices will include this information in their probe requests. The researchers found disparities in the devices that incorporated PNLs in their probe requests. The researchers determined that 92 percent of Blackberry devices disclose part of their PNL, while HTC, Sony, Apple, Samsung, and Nokia devices did not reveal this information as often. Having found SSIDs of networks devices had previously connected to, the researchers were able to conduct statistical analyses of the networks' names.
"We can regard the PNL of a device as a list of significant places visited by the user--significant enough that the user spent some time to connect to the access point," say the researchers. "Therefore, the fact that two users share one or more SSIDs in the PNL of their devices should intuitively provide some information on the existence of a social relationship between the two."
From Techworld Australia
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