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This article seems to do a better job explaining what's actually happening, and contradicts the OP: http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization h

by gr2020 12y ago

This article seems to do a better job explaining what's actually happening, and contradicts the OP: http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization

0x0 12y ago
Interesting that "actual sleep mode" is mostly prevented because of cellular activity. In any case the conclusion is mostly the same: the feature does not really appear to be effective at all.
lstamour 12y ago
For those tl;dr, what Nick's writing about here is that you don't need to turn off cellular data or location services -- the requirement that the phone as to be asleep is instead too restrictive, because your phone is rarely asleep for long. (Those two settings let your phone sleep longer.) > Unfortunately, the requirement of the phone being asleep makes this feature nearly useless, albeit within the description of what Apple advertised at WWDC. In order to get random MACs to be used I had to turn off notifications for multiple apps, turn off push email, and stay up late at night when there was a greater chance of my phone getting to sleep, uninterrupted, for more than a minute or two. Even under these circumstances, I would only encounter one or two rounds of probe beacons (which seem go to out every couple of minutes) with a random MAC before seeing my phone blast a bunch of probes with my real MAC. My best guess is this would happen when some process of push had woken the device up. With cellular data turned on, only about 50% of the probes I saw go out had a randomly assigned MAC. But there's a worse problem, as mentioned in the last paragraph below from the iMore article: > Rendering this feature even more useless, when the probe requests went out with a random MAC, the probes contained SSIDs of 5 networks that the phone had previously connected to. This means even when my MAC is random, the SSIDs it's broadcasting can act as a fingerprint for my phone. My MAC can be different every time probes go out, but if it broadcasts the same set of 5 network names every few minutes, it may still be possible for monitors to track my device.
dang 12y ago
Should we change the url to that?

by gr2020 12y ago

0x0 12y ago

Interesting that "actual sleep mode" is mostly prevented because of cellular activity. In any case the conclusion is mostly the same: the feature does not really appear to be effective at all.

lstamour 12y ago

For those tl;dr, what Nick's writing about here is that you don't need to turn off cellular data or location services -- the requirement that the phone as to be asleep is instead too restrictive, because your phone is rarely asleep for long. (Those two settings let your phone sleep longer.) > Unfortunately, the requirement of the phone being asleep makes this feature nearly useless, albeit within the description of what Apple advertised at WWDC. In order to get random MACs to be used I had to turn off notifications for multiple apps, turn off push email, and stay up late at night when there was a greater chance of my phone getting to sleep, uninterrupted, for more than a minute or two. Even under these circumstances, I would only encounter one or two rounds of probe beacons (which seem go to out every couple of minutes) with a random MAC before seeing my phone blast a bunch of probes with my real MAC. My best guess is this would happen when some process of push had woken the device up. With cellular data turned on, only about 50% of the probes I saw go out had a randomly assigned MAC. But there's a worse problem, as mentioned in the last paragraph below from the iMore article: > Rendering this feature even more useless, when the probe requests went out with a random MAC, the probes contained SSIDs of 5 networks that the phone had previously connected to. This means even when my MAC is random, the SSIDs it's broadcasting can act as a fingerprint for my phone. My MAC can be different every time probes go out, but if it broadcasts the same set of 5 network names every few minutes, it may still be possible for monitors to track my device.

dang 12y ago

Should we change the url to that?