Sensor Characteristics Uniquely Identify Individual Phones

An anonymous reader writes "SFGate reports that Stanford researchers have figured out a way to generate a unique fingerprint from a cell phone's suite of built-in sensors. The tiny accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones, and speakers in cell phones have characteristics that vary slightly from handset to handset, and these variations may contain enough information to uniquely identify a given handset. How that information might get from the phone to a third party varies (the article describes a JavaScript snippet reading the Z-axis accelerometer, though it says little about how the user might block such information from being read), but the possibility for abuse is certainly troubling."

Comments

... nothing new.

[nbvb]

Cell phones have been identifiable by RF fingerprinting for many, many years.

Was a common anti-fraud technique in the analog cellular days.

Re:... nothing new.

[Shoten]

Cell phones have been identifiable by RF fingerprinting for many, many years.

Was a common anti-fraud technique in the analog cellular days.

Yes, but RF fingerprinting requires proximity to the cell phone. This is a form of fingerprinting that can be done to large population en masse from pretty much anywhere. This is actually something *very* new.

IMEI and MAC addresses?

[Rambo Tribble]

I was of the impression that anything that accesses the cell network already has a unique IMEI adddress and that devices that access networks have a unique MAC address. What does this provide that they don't? It would seem this information could be spoofed at least as easily as such hardware addresses.