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icameron 3 hours ago [-]
I was in the space 10 years ago with a product. Primarily Bluetooth, later BLE and WiFi. At that time most consumer devices were constantly discoverable. About 3-5% of traffic would have a disoverable MAC. These days not so many. iPhones never are discoverable unless you are in pairing mode. BLE broadcasts beacons much more consistently and generates a lot of data to filter, but they also change MACs.
Most WiFi chipsets use hardware based MAC layer, so promiscuous monitoring / sniffing is not possible on virtually every embedded module. There were a few chipsets, known as SoftMAC where linux drivers did the MAC layer, in which you could truly sniff the air for all traffic and capture a whole lot of MAC addresses. That was much more useful, but requires more CPU and specific older hardware. If you have a permanent power source like in a ALPR that isn't as much of a concern. I don't know of any companies that really did this though. Almost all our competitors used solutions that only supported the usual device discovery, which relies on BT being discoverable, or AP mode WiFi in order to track a MAC address. It's really easy to market though, it sounds great on paper. In practice the results are less than stellar and with time got even worse as vendors stopped being discoverable by default, and handsets started using used dynamic MAC addresses
ryukoposting 2 hours ago [-]
> BLE broadcasts beacons much more consistently and generates a lot of data to filter, but they also change MACs.
Hah! I wish this were true. The overwhelming majority of BLE widgets don't use resolvable random private addresses. They could, they just don't. A huge share of the industry is just copy-pasting Nordic sample code until they have a shippable product, and last I checked, exactly one (1) Nordic sample project enables RRPAs. Nordic treats it as an edge case, and everyone else follows along.
And that's besides the issue that the RRPA rotation algorithm is pretty contrived. I'd be shocked if some three-letter hasn't already built a tool for tracking devices that use it.
GlitchRider47 2 hours ago [-]
Using AirGuard on Android, I'm able to detect iPhones around me even when they are not in pairing mode.
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
>I'm able to detect iPhones around me even when they are not in pairing mode.
Right, but the mac is randomized every 15 min, which makes tracking hard to pull off.
7 minutes ago [-]
analogpixel 2 hours ago [-]
Program your flipper0 to record all wireless identifications for a few weeks. hook broadcaster to amplifier and attach to your car playing all the time. Every time you drive by one of these, it'll look like a parade just went by.
Probably do the same thing when you go into retail stores. just flood the place with every possible identification.
Maybe an easier solution is just write something that spoofs hundreds of fake ids and sends them out constantly where ever you go; bonus points if you can create IDs that can break the devices when they try to parse it.
bigiain 1 hours ago [-]
Flipper Zero (without extra hardware) doesn't do 2.4 GHz for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (or 5GHz Wi-Fi).
On the other hand, I'd bet for under $10 you could build something with an ESP32 and a battery and solar panel that could spoof signals these things will believe all day.
I'd start with transmitting signals with MAC vendor prefixes identifying Axon Tasers and Bodycams. Make it look like there's thousands of cops going past every day.
I'd love it if someone managed to get a bluetooth and wifi sniffer close enough to the CEO of Flock and publish that fingerprint. Or sneak a sniffer into a Flock board meeting and sniff out all the board members and c suite's devices. Or a meeting of local politicians and cops who're supporting and paying for this. I mean, that can't possibly be illegal or even wrong, if they're doing it wholesale, right?
wolrah 21 minutes ago [-]
> Flipper Zero (without extra hardware) doesn't do 2.4 GHz for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (or 5GHz Wi-Fi).
Flipper Zero has Bluetooth built in, that's how the phone app works.
I don't know how much control the apps have over it, but there were definitely Flipper apps to abuse the BLE auto-pairing feature of a lot of devices and spam popups to nearby phones.
puppycodes 1 hours ago [-]
There are very few ways to fight stuff like this and 100% agree this is a good one. I predict we are gonna need so much more of this type of obfuscation to just live our lives normally.
stevenhubertron 27 minutes ago [-]
Seems like a great use for Fable ;)
AndrewKemendo 1 hours ago [-]
I have a F0 but it’s been sitting in my drawer any links to good scripts to run for this?
I used to go pop teslas all the time but that got old
dabinat 1 hours ago [-]
MAC randomization is all well and good but that extra security is undercut if people name their device with their full name. It seems to be common with Apple devices especially. After seeing just how much data my neighbors were leaking with their device names, I name all of mine with nondescript names that do not identify me or the device.
39 minutes ago [-]
crumpled 2 hours ago [-]
According to the graphic, all RFID/NFC tags including pet microchips and your company badge will be associated with you too.
I can remember in the late 1990's Berkeley Public Library was considering adding RFID tags to the books as asset tags. The public push-back was significant and surprising at the time. Freedom-loving library patrons were concerned about nefarious tracking. Proponents of the new tags thought that the concept of tracking people or the books they read was rooted in paranoia.
bigiain 54 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how theyre going to get that to work at range? I reckon you'd need pretty big and specialised antennas to have and hope of reading RFID or NFC off devices in a car going past a Flock surveillance camera. Even people walking past are going to be more that a few meters away, which is and order of magnitude further away that RFID and NFC are typically read from.
Not impossible, but it feels pretty unlikely that'd work inside the enclosure of a typical ALPR camera and at the distances devices would typically be away from them. Not without national security or military budgets at least. (Although perhaps that have that kind of budget? I mean one insular and NIMBY tech billionaire could pay for that in their San Francisco neighborhood. Possible already has, perhaps that where this company came from?)
mikeocool 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't it not really possible to uniquely identify most modern bluetooth devices this way? Specifically to prevent things like this.
Unless they're hoping my AirPods are in pairing mode all of the time and they're going to track the name "mikeocool's AirPods."
3 hours ago [-]
madaxe_again 3 hours ago [-]
They just need to link a cluster to you in the first place - say at a toll booth or drive-thru - where ANPR is already commonly deployed.
snailmailman 3 hours ago [-]
I thought most modern Bluetooth devices essentially randomize the Bluetooth MAC address periodically, specifically to prevent this sort of tracking? And random MAC addresses too on WiFi.
Rebelgecko 3 hours ago [-]
If someone has a half dozen BT devices on their person/in their car and they randomize MACs hourly (but not all at once) I bet you could still track people pretty accurately.
mikeocool 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much that actually helps. A license plate scanner and a camera can easily identify me in my car. What tracking advantage does “there are three (probably) Apple devices” in the car as well confer.
If I’m away from my car later, I’m just a guy walking around with 3 Apple devices (or two if I forget my phone in the car).
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> A license plate scanner and a camera can easily identify me in my car.
Sure, but now you can track someone from their car through public transport, shops and god knows wherever else someone placed a sniffer.
And no, randomization doesn't help, because in the end the Find My beacons have to resolve down to some common identifier otherwise the "an unknown device has been following you for 2 hours" warning would not work.
wolrah 8 minutes ago [-]
> in the end the Find My beacons have to resolve down to some common identifier otherwise the "an unknown device has been following you for 2 hours" warning would not work.
Not really, this is actually pretty easy. If such a device beacons and a trusted device is within range the trusted device can respond to the beacon and let it know it's nearby, then it just counts up if not. X number of beacons with no response, set the "not near my trusted device" flag. Some other device sees X number of beacons with that flag set while moving around, send alert to the user.
mikeocool 7 minutes ago [-]
Doesn’t the Find My stalking tracking work by connecting the the randomized id back to a unique device on Apple’s servers?
So yeah, if they subponea/coerce Apple (or Apple signs up willingly) they could track people individually.
But at that point we’re no longer talking about large scale tracking by an untrusted third party. Apple and my phone company have always been able to track me without getting license plate scanners involved.
josefritzishere 3 hours ago [-]
This feels illegal. If it's not, it probably should be.
RunningDroid 1 hours ago [-]
It should be, but the last time the US got new privacy regulation it was because an employee at a VHS rental store embarrassed a member of Congress by telling people what movies he'd rented.
puppycodes 1 hours ago [-]
This is essentially a wiretap.
It's illegal in most states to place a listening device in public that captures private conversations, this is basically no different.
chenster 3 hours ago [-]
Privacy is no more if that is true
PowerElectronix 3 hours ago [-]
Now that I think of it, I'd be surprised if there aren't a few lists of this kind already made by an agency/company or two.
Most WiFi chipsets use hardware based MAC layer, so promiscuous monitoring / sniffing is not possible on virtually every embedded module. There were a few chipsets, known as SoftMAC where linux drivers did the MAC layer, in which you could truly sniff the air for all traffic and capture a whole lot of MAC addresses. That was much more useful, but requires more CPU and specific older hardware. If you have a permanent power source like in a ALPR that isn't as much of a concern. I don't know of any companies that really did this though. Almost all our competitors used solutions that only supported the usual device discovery, which relies on BT being discoverable, or AP mode WiFi in order to track a MAC address. It's really easy to market though, it sounds great on paper. In practice the results are less than stellar and with time got even worse as vendors stopped being discoverable by default, and handsets started using used dynamic MAC addresses
Hah! I wish this were true. The overwhelming majority of BLE widgets don't use resolvable random private addresses. They could, they just don't. A huge share of the industry is just copy-pasting Nordic sample code until they have a shippable product, and last I checked, exactly one (1) Nordic sample project enables RRPAs. Nordic treats it as an edge case, and everyone else follows along.
And that's besides the issue that the RRPA rotation algorithm is pretty contrived. I'd be shocked if some three-letter hasn't already built a tool for tracking devices that use it.
Right, but the mac is randomized every 15 min, which makes tracking hard to pull off.
Probably do the same thing when you go into retail stores. just flood the place with every possible identification.
Maybe an easier solution is just write something that spoofs hundreds of fake ids and sends them out constantly where ever you go; bonus points if you can create IDs that can break the devices when they try to parse it.
On the other hand, I'd bet for under $10 you could build something with an ESP32 and a battery and solar panel that could spoof signals these things will believe all day.
I'd start with transmitting signals with MAC vendor prefixes identifying Axon Tasers and Bodycams. Make it look like there's thousands of cops going past every day.
I'd love it if someone managed to get a bluetooth and wifi sniffer close enough to the CEO of Flock and publish that fingerprint. Or sneak a sniffer into a Flock board meeting and sniff out all the board members and c suite's devices. Or a meeting of local politicians and cops who're supporting and paying for this. I mean, that can't possibly be illegal or even wrong, if they're doing it wholesale, right?
Flipper Zero has Bluetooth built in, that's how the phone app works.
I don't know how much control the apps have over it, but there were definitely Flipper apps to abuse the BLE auto-pairing feature of a lot of devices and spam popups to nearby phones.
I used to go pop teslas all the time but that got old
I can remember in the late 1990's Berkeley Public Library was considering adding RFID tags to the books as asset tags. The public push-back was significant and surprising at the time. Freedom-loving library patrons were concerned about nefarious tracking. Proponents of the new tags thought that the concept of tracking people or the books they read was rooted in paranoia.
Not impossible, but it feels pretty unlikely that'd work inside the enclosure of a typical ALPR camera and at the distances devices would typically be away from them. Not without national security or military budgets at least. (Although perhaps that have that kind of budget? I mean one insular and NIMBY tech billionaire could pay for that in their San Francisco neighborhood. Possible already has, perhaps that where this company came from?)
Unless they're hoping my AirPods are in pairing mode all of the time and they're going to track the name "mikeocool's AirPods."
If I’m away from my car later, I’m just a guy walking around with 3 Apple devices (or two if I forget my phone in the car).
Sure, but now you can track someone from their car through public transport, shops and god knows wherever else someone placed a sniffer.
And no, randomization doesn't help, because in the end the Find My beacons have to resolve down to some common identifier otherwise the "an unknown device has been following you for 2 hours" warning would not work.
Not really, this is actually pretty easy. If such a device beacons and a trusted device is within range the trusted device can respond to the beacon and let it know it's nearby, then it just counts up if not. X number of beacons with no response, set the "not near my trusted device" flag. Some other device sees X number of beacons with that flag set while moving around, send alert to the user.
So yeah, if they subponea/coerce Apple (or Apple signs up willingly) they could track people individually.
But at that point we’re no longer talking about large scale tracking by an untrusted third party. Apple and my phone company have always been able to track me without getting license plate scanners involved.
It's illegal in most states to place a listening device in public that captures private conversations, this is basically no different.