A Study on Device Identification from BLE Advertising Packets with Randomized MAC Addresses
Shuhei Akiyama, Ryoya Morimoto, Yoshiaki Taniguchi · 2021
In smartphones and personal computers, the media access control (MAC) addresses of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are often randomized to improve the privacy of users. However, in research using packets sent by such devices, if the MAC addresses are randomized, then a problem is that it is not possible to know which packet was sent by which experimental device. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying BLE devices with randomized MAC addresses without using device-specific values. Experimental evaluations using BLE packets from a real application show that the proposed method can identify MAC addresses with an accuracy of up to 98% when there are 20 devices.