Smartphone User Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Huang, Yong, Dong, Zhibo, Yang, Xiaoguang, Zhang, Dalong, Wang, Qingxian, Wang, Zhihua
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914137699778560
author Huang, Yong
Dong, Zhibo
Yang, Xiaoguang
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Qingxian
Wang, Zhihua
author_facet Huang, Yong
Dong, Zhibo
Yang, Xiaoguang
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Qingxian
Wang, Zhihua
contents Due to the openness of the wireless medium, smartphone users are susceptible to user privacy attacks, where user privacy information is inferred from encrypted Wi-Fi wireless traffic. Existing attacks are limited to recognizing mobile apps and their actions and cannot infer the smartphone user identity, a fundamental part of user privacy. To overcome this limitation, we propose U-Print, a novel attack system that can passively recognize smartphone apps, actions, and users from over-the-air MAC-layer frames. We observe that smartphone users usually prefer different add-on apps and in-app actions, yielding different changing patterns in Wi-Fi traffic. U-Print first extracts multi-level traffic features and exploits customized temporal convolutional networks to recognize smartphone apps and actions, thus producing users' behavior sequences. Then, it leverages the silhouette coefficient method to determine the number of users and applies the k-means clustering to profile and identify smartphone users. We implement U-Print using a laptop with a Kali dual-band wireless network card and evaluate it in three real-world environments. U-Print achieves an overall accuracy of 98.4% and an F1 score of 0.983 for user inference. Moreover, it can correctly recognize up to 96% of apps and actions in the closed world and more than 86% in the open world.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Smartphone User Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic
Huang, Yong
Dong, Zhibo
Yang, Xiaoguang
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Qingxian
Wang, Zhihua
Cryptography and Security
Due to the openness of the wireless medium, smartphone users are susceptible to user privacy attacks, where user privacy information is inferred from encrypted Wi-Fi wireless traffic. Existing attacks are limited to recognizing mobile apps and their actions and cannot infer the smartphone user identity, a fundamental part of user privacy. To overcome this limitation, we propose U-Print, a novel attack system that can passively recognize smartphone apps, actions, and users from over-the-air MAC-layer frames. We observe that smartphone users usually prefer different add-on apps and in-app actions, yielding different changing patterns in Wi-Fi traffic. U-Print first extracts multi-level traffic features and exploits customized temporal convolutional networks to recognize smartphone apps and actions, thus producing users' behavior sequences. Then, it leverages the silhouette coefficient method to determine the number of users and applies the k-means clustering to profile and identify smartphone users. We implement U-Print using a laptop with a Kali dual-band wireless network card and evaluate it in three real-world environments. U-Print achieves an overall accuracy of 98.4% and an F1 score of 0.983 for user inference. Moreover, it can correctly recognize up to 96% of apps and actions in the closed world and more than 86% in the open world.
title Smartphone User Fingerprinting on Wireless Traffic
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03229