How Your Phone, Laptop, or Watch can be Tracked by their Bluetooth Transmissions
An Anonymous Coward writes:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/bluetooth_tracking_device/
Over the past few years, mobile devices have become increasingly chatty over the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol and this turns out to be a somewhat significant privacy risk.
Seven boffins[*] at University of California San Diego - Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Eliana Rodriguez Herrera, Hector Rodrigo Lopez Soto, Christian Dameff, Dinesh Bharadia, and Aaron Schulman - tested the BLE implementations on several popular phones, PCs, and gadgets, and found they can be tracked through their physical signaling characteristics albeit with intermittent success.
That means the devices may emit a unique fingerprint, meaning it's possible to look out for those fingerprints in multiple locations to figure out where those devices have been and when. This could be used to track people; you'll have to use your imagination to determine who would or could usefully exploit this. That said, at least two members of the team believe it's worth product makers addressing this privacy weakness.
The academics describe their findings in a paper [PDF], "Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices," which is scheduled to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2022.
[*] Boffin is a British slang term for a scientist, engineer, or other person engaged in technical or scientific research and development.
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