Wireless and Mobile Device Security, 2nd Edition

New Methods of Mobile Fingerprinting

In addition to the fingerprinting methods mentioned earlier—which, for mobile devices, are less than ideal—researchers have developed new methods that do a better job of finding characteristics that are both unique and stable. It turns out that with mobile devices, each device’s physical features may yield sufficient, if not ideal, characteristics for fingerprinting.

An example of this type of research, carried out and published by Stanford University, involves detecting tiny differences in the manufacturing tolerance of the subcomponents embedded in mobile devices. Specifically, the research focused on finding unique identifiers by measuring the performance of the microphone and the accelerometer (a sensor ...