Public Wireless Packets Anonymously Hurt You

With growing privacy concerns over the last decade, two of the most notable wireless technologies – i.e., BLE and WiFi – are being more and more investigated in terms of privacy vulnerabilities. In this paper, we explore this problem, prospect the related consequences, and alert the need for privacy-preserving public packets. We identify key flaws in the current design of public packets like beacons and probe requests. We discuss them as the cause of privacy issues that require the community’s attention. We address the flaws in detail and propose solutions that facilitate the devices to protect user privacy. We also give recommendations based on the findings to the standard.