CrowdWatch: Privacy-Preserving Monitoring Leveraging WiFi Multiple Access Information
Sheida Nozari, Halar Haleem, Chiara Garibotto, Andrea Sciarrone, Igor Bisio, Fabio Lavagetto · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
The use of multiple access protocols information in Internet of Things (IoT) environments has gained significant interest over the past decade, particularly for crowd behavior monitoring. Due to its high data rates and low infrastructure requirements, WiFi is considered one of the most promising wireless technologies for leveraging the explosive growth of transmitted data from mobile devices. However, with the introduction of MAC address randomization and the application of new randomization policies on assigning randomized sequence numbers (SNs) to transmitted frames in mobile devices to enhance privacy, traditional approaches to device identification face significant challenges. To tackle this issue, we conduct a comprehensive analysis at the multiple access level and propose CrowdWatch which is an innovative framework designed to enhance the understanding and utilization of MAC randomization dynamics. Additionally, we introduce a novel approach that leverages multiple device-specific features to accurately associate frames with randomized MAC addresses to their corresponding devices. By integrating multimodal fingerprints, the framework can effectively identify mobile devices and track their behavior. The presented approach ensures reliable detection even under the latest randomization policies. We examined the introduced framework through real-world experiments, and the findings prove that it is an effective solution for smart building management and occupancy estimation in dynamic environments.