[IP] more on remote physical device fingerprinting

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: David Josephson <dlj@josephson.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 12:37:12 -0800
To: <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] remote physical device fingerprinting

Kurt passed on an interesting link to a paper:

> From: Kurt Albershardt <kurt@nv.net>
> To: dave@farber.net
> Subject: remote physical device fingerprinting
> Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 11:41:59 -0800
> 
> Interesting paper.
> 
> http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2005/fingerprinting/
> 
> We introduce the area of remote physical device fingerprinting, or
> fingerprinting a physical device, as opposed to an operating system or class
> of devices, remotely, and without the fingerprinted device's known

This is not new. The law enforcement and two-way radio community has
been doing this for years to identify radio users, exploiting the
characteristic frequency settling waveform as a transmitter starts. An
open source tool was released in 1995; the current version is
http://xmit.penguinman.com/xmit_id.html  It would be useful only for
unsophisticated targets; adding a random wander to any remotely
measurable parameter should be trivial, and in fact many computing
devices do just that now, to spread the spectral content of their
internal clock signals in order to meet EMC requirements.

------ End of Forwarded Message


-------------------------------------
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/