On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 06:38:00PM -0400, Donald Eastlake wrote:
bssid/macs are manufacturer based but there are companies that provide
positioning services based on learning where those MACs are -- typically
combining such MAC based Wi-Fi/Bluetooth information with IP, GPS, ...
information to try to get an accurate location. If you happen to be in a
hotel function room and can only see meeting provided APs, so you can't see
any fixed local APs, you can easily get Geolocated to the previous meeting
site.
What really surprises me is that it should be relatively easy for
these geolocation services to detect that BSSID/MAC's for the Access
Points belong to conference / rental services. The pattern is pretty
obvious, even if the conference isn't kind enough to provide the
BSSID/MAC list to geolocation service.
The IETF AP's go active for a short-time, and then go dark, and when
they come back, they are obviously in a different location --- users
who geolocate to those AP's quickly shown to be in the "wrong" place,
in that when they get Cell Tower information, it conflicts with the
geolocation hint associated with the AP. If they are rental AP's,
perhaps the only go dark for a day or two before they come up in a
different location, but the pattern of "these AP does not have a
stable geolocation" should be really easy to spot. (At least, until
Star Trek style transporters or some other matter teleporter comes a
Thing.)
The service could keep them on a list of AP's where after they go dark
for say, 24 hours, when they come back on-line the system should try
to use location services based on cell tower, GPS, etc., to figure out
where they are on a real-time basis. And if the system isn't able to
do that kind of automatical location deduction on a real-time basis,
it could simply blacklist those AP's for use as a geolocation hint.
This doesn't seem hard....
- Ted