Mobile Device Identification via Sensor Fingerprinting

Understand

We demonstrate how the multitude of sensors on a smartphone can be used to construct a reliable hardware fingerprint of the phone.

• Such a fingerprint can be used to de-anonymize mobile devices as they connect to web sites, and as a second factor in identifying legitimate users to a remote server.
• We present two implementations: one based on analyzing the frequency response of the speakerphone-microphone system, and another based on analyzing device-specific accelerometer calibration errors.
• Our accelerometer-based fingerprint is especially interesting because the accelerometer is accessible via JavaScript running in a mobile web browser without requesting any permissions or notifying the user.