Janne Lindqvist

Privacy of Mobile Computers: Chattering Laptops  and Protecting
Privacy with Protocol Stack Virtualization

Mobile computer users often have a false sense of anonymity when they
connect to the Internet at cafes, hotels, airports or other public
places. We have analyzed information leaked by mobile computers to
the local access link when they are outside their home domain. We
found that all layers of the protocol stack leak various plaintext
identifiers of the user, the computer and their affiliations to the
local link, which a casual attacker can observe. We propose two
independent mitigation mechanisms for these leaks: /network location
awareness/ can be used to prevent unnecessary service discovery
attempts and /protocol stack virtualization/ provides isolation for
the traffic sent to the network, for example, every application uses
a distinct identifier space on all layers of the protocol stack.