LAPWiN: Location-aided probing for protecting user privacy in Wi-Fi networks

Efficient Wi-Fi probing has been demonstrated to leak sensitive user information. During the probing process, Wi-Fi clients transmit the names of previously known Wi-Fi access points (APs) in plaintext. An eavesdropper can easily collect the information leaked by this Wi-Fi probing process to mount numerous attacks, such as fake AP or revealing hidden APs, or to breach users' privacy. Since APs are often named after the location, business, or affiliation of the host, an attacker can learn about nearby users and infer social connections. In this work, we propose to reduce the privacy risk while simultaneously decreasing the network connection time by eliminating unnecessary probe requests, most notably those requests sent to networks that are not in proximity of the device. We present a location-aided Wi-Fi probing mechanisms called LAPWiN to achieve these improvements. We demonstrate how LAPWiN can be implemented by modifying a widely used network manager and evaluate the performance and achievable privacy gains.