Daniel Micay Profile picture
Security researcher/engineer working on mobile privacy/security. Founder of @GrapheneOS.

Sep 16, 2020, 5 tweets



Android 11 disables usage of stable "privacy" addresses for networks where MAC randomization is being used. We'll no longer need to disable this feature. The other issues we've discovered and put initial work into addressing are still problems though.



Silly bot.

Disabling IPv6 would certainly be an easy way to address multiple issues in the Linux kernel implementation providing a way to track users across networks. Linux kernel's take on "privacy" addresses regresses privacy in some very serious ways.

Linux reuses "privacy" addresses across networks. This leaks that it's the same device connecting from a different network. It does this even when randomizing the MAC address. It also uses a very long lifetime for these addresses by default. It's a pretty bad implementation.

There are other issues beyond this too, including problematic timers and overly coarse (or simply poor) randomization. Many of the harder issues to solve are due to having the OS split up into a bunch of independent projects. Serious lack of whole picture privacy/security work.

If standards recommend an implementation that would require coordination between wpa_supplicant and the Linux kernel or something similar, they tend to take shortcuts resulting in weaker privacy than expected. A lot of these things have been considered in newer RFCs...

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