Automatic Attendance Taking: A Proof of Concept on Privacy Concerns in 802.11 MAC Address Probing

Abstract

Modern data communication paradigm involves many unsolicited data transmissions that poses privacy issues given the proliferation of big data and artificial intelligence (A.I.). In 802.x protocol which dominate wireless communication; Wi-Fi enabled devices voluntarily embed devices MAC address during SSID discovery when connecting to access point (AP). Such vulnerability has been massively exploited for unauthorized devices tracking without user consents. This paper proposed an opportunistic attendance taking system (OATA) using MAC address probing as a proof of concepts to demonstrate the significance of this exploit. The intuition is that student’s attendance can be implied based on the MAC address of their mobile devices when approaching lecture hall installed with AP(s). The body of this work focuses on comparing the OATA to some prominent attendance taking methods in pervasiveness and accuracy. For the operational hypothesis, a non-synthetic dataset is used for experimental evaluation to simulate realness and to minimize hawthorn effect. OATA is designed to circumvent MAC address randomization that is used on modern IOS and Android OS for accurate tracking. The experimental results showed that OATA is highly accurate at capturing device’s presence; achieving true positive rate (TPr) of 0.938 and false positive rate (FPr) of 0.063 with fast convergence time. The significance of this study highlight the concerns that big data coupled with increasingly intelligent A.I. can divulge more information than originally intended. Consequently, user’s privacy is compromised as their personal communication devices are demonstrated to be potentially exploited for unsolicited location tracking.