skip to main content
10.1145/2462096.2462099acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswisecConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Who do you sync you are?: smartphone fingerprinting via application behaviour

Published: 17 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The overall network traffic patterns generated by today's smartphones result from the typically large and diverse set of installed applications. In addition to the traffic generated by the user, most applications generate characteristic traffic from their background activities, such as periodic update requests or server synchronisation. Although the encryption of transmitted data in 3G networks prevents an eavesdropper from analysing the content, periodic traffic patterns leak side-channel information like timing and data volume. In this work, we extract such side-channel features from network traffic generated from the most popular applications, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, Dropbox, and others, and evaluate whether they can be used to reliably identify a smartphone. By computing fingerprints from approx,6,hours of background traffic, we show that 15 minutes of monitored traffic suffice to reliably identify a smartphone based on its behavioural fingerprint with a success probability of 90%.

References

[1]
Gartner. http://tinyurl.com/d7ptpqc, 2012. {Online; accessed 11/10/2012}.
[2]
Nielsen. http://tinyurl.com/8y2e773, 2012. {Online; accessed 11/10/2012}.
[3]
3GPP. TS 25.213, Spreading and modulation (FDD). Technical report, 1999.
[4]
K. Bonne Rasmussen and S. Capkun. Implications of radio fingerprinting on the security of sensor networks. In Third International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communications Networks, SecureComm'07, 2007.
[5]
V. Brik, S. Banerjee, M. Gruteser, and S. Oh. Wireless device identification with radiometric signatures. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom'08, 2008.
[6]
Danev B., Zanetti D., Capkun S. On physical-layer identification of wireless devices. http://www.syssec.ethz.ch/research/OnPhysId.pdf, 2012. {Online; accessed 22/10/2012}.
[7]
L. C. C. Desmond, C. C. Yuan, T. C. Pheng, and R. S. Lee. Identifying unique devices through wireless fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Wireless Network Security, WiSec'08, 2008.
[8]
K. P. Dyer, S. E. Coull, T. Ristenpart, and T. Shrimpton. Peek-a-boo, i still see you: Why efficient traffic analysis countermeasures fail. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP'12, 2012.
[9]
J. Erman, M. Arlitt, and A. Mahanti. Traffic classification using clustering algorithms. In Proceedings of the 2006 SIGCOMM workshop on Mining Network Data, MineNet'06, 2006.
[10]
H. Falaki, D. Lymberopoulos, R. Mahajan, S. Kandula, and D. Estrin. A first look at traffic on smartphones. In Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Internet Measurement, IMC'10, 2010.
[11]
J. Franklin, D. McCoy, P. Tabriz, V. Neagoe, J. Van Randwyk, and D. Sicker. Passive data link layer 802.11 wireless device driver fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 15th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX-SS'06, 2006.
[12]
R. M. Gerdes, T. E. Daniels, M. Mina, and S. F. Russell. Device identification via analog signal fingerprinting: A matched filter approach. In In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS'06, 2006.
[13]
I. Guyon and A. Elisseeff. An introduction to variable and feature selection. J. Mach. Learn. Res., 2003.
[14]
F. R. Hampel. The breakdown points of the mean combined with some rejection rules. Technometrics.
[15]
T. Kohno, A. Broido, and K. Claffy. Remote physical device fingerprinting. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2005.
[16]
M. Liberatore and B. N. Levine. Inferring the source of encrypted http connections. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS '06, 2006.
[17]
K. G. Paterson, T. Ristenpart, and T. Shrimpton. Tag size does matter: attacks and proofs for the tls record protocol. In Proceedings of the 17th international conference on The Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT'11, 2011.
[18]
T. S. Saponas, J. Lester, C. Hartung, S. Agarwal, and T. Kohno. Devices that tell on you: privacy trends in consumer ubiquitous computing. In Proceedings of 16th USENIX Security Symposium on USENIX Security Symposium, SS'07, 2007.
[19]
O. Ureten and N. Serinken. Wireless security through rf fingerprinting. Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2007.
[20]
C. Wright, L. Ballard, S. Coull, F. Monrose, and G. Masson. Spot me if you can: Uncovering spoken phrases in encrypted voip conversations. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP'08, 2008.
[21]
S. Zander, T. Nguyen, and G. Armitage. Automated traffic classification and application identification using machine learning. In The IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2005.
[22]
F. Zhang, W. He, X. Liu, and P. G. Bridges. Inferring users' online activities through traffic analysis. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Wireless Network Security, WiSec'11, 2011.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Eavesdropping Mobile Apps and Actions Through Wireless Traffic in the Open WorldAdvanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications10.1007/978-981-97-5609-4_1(3-15)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Efficient Fingerprinting Attack on Web Applications: An Adaptive Symbolization ApproachElectronics10.3390/electronics1213294812:13(2948)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Mobile traffic classification through burst traffic statistical features2023 IEEE 97th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2023-Spring)10.1109/VTC2023-Spring57618.2023.10200032(1-5)Online publication date: Jun-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Who do you sync you are?: smartphone fingerprinting via application behaviour

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    WiSec '13: Proceedings of the sixth ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless and mobile networks
    April 2013
    230 pages
    ISBN:9781450319980
    DOI:10.1145/2462096
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 17 April 2013

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. authentication
    2. measurement
    3. smartphone

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    WISEC'13
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    WiSec '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 70 submissions, 37%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 338 submissions, 29%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)38
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Eavesdropping Mobile Apps and Actions Through Wireless Traffic in the Open WorldAdvanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications10.1007/978-981-97-5609-4_1(3-15)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Efficient Fingerprinting Attack on Web Applications: An Adaptive Symbolization ApproachElectronics10.3390/electronics1213294812:13(2948)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Mobile traffic classification through burst traffic statistical features2023 IEEE 97th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2023-Spring)10.1109/VTC2023-Spring57618.2023.10200032(1-5)Online publication date: Jun-2023
    • (2023)A Survey on Fingerprinting Technologies for Smartphones Based on Embedded TransducersIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2023.327788310:16(14646-14670)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2023
    • (2023)GLADSComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2023.109652225:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2023
    • (2023) Evolution toward intelligent communications: Impact of deep learning applications on the future of 6G technology WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery10.1002/widm.152114:1Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
    • (2022)Classification of Encrypted IoT Traffic despite Padding and ShapingProceedings of the 21st Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society10.1145/3559613.3563191(1-13)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
    • (2022)A Device Fingerprinting Technique to Authenticate End-user Devices in Wireless Networks2022 IEEE 2nd International Symposium on Sustainable Energy, Signal Processing and Cyber Security (iSSSC)10.1109/iSSSC56467.2022.10051406(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
    • (2022)BSBA: Burst Series Based Approach for Identifying Fake Free-traffic2022 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM54355.2022.00019(31-39)Online publication date: Jun-2022
    • (2022)MCFM: Discover Sensitive Behavior from Encrypted Traffic in Industrial Control System2022 IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom56396.2022.00124(897-904)Online publication date: Dec-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media