Wi-Fi fingerprints could end MAC spoofing
A new security technique promises to uniquely identify any Wi-Fi device in the world, so hackers cannot hide behind a fake MAC address.
Every wireless device has a unique signal "fingerprint" produced by variations produced in the manufacturing process for silicon components, according to Dr Jeyanthi Hall, a post-graduate working at Carleton University in Ottawa.
As a doctoral student, Dr Hall analyzed the RF signals of fifteen devices from six manufacturers, and found it was possible to distinguish clearly, even between devices from the same manufacturer.
Using "transceiverprints", Dr Hall got a detection rate of 95 percent, and a false positive rate of zero, according to a draft paper submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.
She achieved this reliability in the task of "recognizing" the transceiverprint from a pre-recorded set - a job which could usefully be built into a wireless IDS, she says in the paper. Beyond this, things could get even more exciting: "It would be interesting to identify the correct transceiver (from the set of all profiled transceivers), using the same set of transceiverprints," she goes on.
