Passive Smart Phone Indentification and Tracking with Application Set Fingerprints
Norihiro Fukumoto, Shigehiro Ano, Shigeki Goto · Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network · 2013
Current smart phone users can be identified and tracked by fingerprint techniques. Fingerprint identification techniques can be used for legitimate purposes such as network management and traffic control to avoid excessive congestion. This paper proposes a user identification and tracking technique specific to smart phone users for supervised network management. This paper proposes the application set fingerprint, which is a simple set of User-Agent request-header fields in HTTP sessions. The application set fingerprint has three advantages, fully-passive fingerprint generation, potential of user trackability, and fingerprinting considering the users' privacy. The results show that the application set fingerprint is practically effective and network operators can use it for tracking smart phone users with the purpose of efficient network management.