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Author Topic: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices  (Read 2431 times)

Rooftop

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Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« on: August 03, 2015, 10:35:23 PM »
The Independent: Phone batteries can be used to spy on their owners, could track people around the internet.
http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwyIy1pCI
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littleman

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2015, 10:58:57 PM »
Hmm, so the phone gives off charge number and time to  discharge.  Then an organization that sees the same pattern over multiple sites could see that it is the same device.  I am not sure how big a deal this is.  Your IP address is also passed around, as is a host of other ENV data that could identify you across sites.  Looks like the feature could be disabled in Firefox.
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BoL

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #2 on: August 04, 2015, 09:00:59 AM »
Doesn't seem like a big deal unless there's lots of decimal places on the charge. In that case the charge used in in-between pages is a bit of unknown quantity.
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JasonD

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2015, 10:06:16 AM »
Having done (in Pzyche) mass fingerprinting in users this, on it's own, doesn't seem like a big deal..

However, when added to all the other data a user gives you the combined entropy is probably large enough to give a very high chance of successful IDing.

The battery metric alone value is low, but in all these things it's like a dripping tap filling up a bath. One drop on it's own isn't a big deal, but collectively those drops add up

The full paper is here - https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/616.pdf
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littleman

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #4 on: August 04, 2015, 04:08:27 PM »
Right.  I remember there was a website where it would give you a footprint of how unique your signature is by looking at lots of available browser data, stuff like UA (which actually gives out a lot of data these days including OS & browser build version), encoding, language accepting.   Even if you mask your IP, there is still a lot of data that stays consistent on your computer but has a lot of variation from computer to computer.  Battery info is just another piece of the puzzle.

Anybody remember that website?  I think it was posted at the old core some years back.
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Drastic

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #5 on: August 04, 2015, 05:31:02 PM »
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littleman

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #6 on: August 04, 2015, 05:38:04 PM »
Yeah, that's it.  Thanks Dras!

>Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,678,573 tested so far.

And that is from a very run of the mill Dell laptop running Windows 7.
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buckworks

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #7 on: August 04, 2015, 09:07:03 PM »
I'm unique too.
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Rooftop

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Re: Interesting fingerprint on mobile devices
« Reply #8 on: August 05, 2015, 08:17:18 AM »
panopticlick reports that my mobile shares footprint with 1 other user.  I'm now wondering whether I've done it on that phone before.

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