Skip to content
This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 28, 2024. It is now read-only.
This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 28, 2024. It is now read-only.

Consider predictability of temporary identifiers (section 2.12) #26

Description

@Perdu

As I've worked on temporary identifiers during my thesis, I see two points that should be taken into consideration for section 2.12 ("What temporary identifiers might this this specification create or expose to the web?"):

  • a temporary identifier which changes predictably does not provide sufficient privacy guarantees. For instance, when a Wi-Fi-enabled device emits probe request frames on a regular frequency containing a sequence number incremented with a predictable scheme (typically +1 or -1 on each frame), an attacker may easily predict following sequence numbers and thus break the anonymity of device brought by MAC address randomization. While the Gamepad API example does not violates this in itself, I think it may lead one to think that a simple incrementing counter is sufficient to provide privacy.

  • It should be made sure that temporary identifiers are generated without statistical biais. This is once again a problem I encountered while studying MAC address randomization, as some chips failed to provide a good level of randomness for temporary MAC addresses, leading addresses to be reused by the same device. These "bad randomness addresses" thus constituted a potential identifier to detect the same device in the future.

I suggest adding these two points regarding predictability of temporary identifiers to the 2.12 section.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Fields

    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions