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Proposed MAC Sniffing Dongle Intended To Help Recover Stolen Electronics

Posted by timothy on from the you-want-the-whole-fingerprint dept.

An anonymous reader writes to say that an Iowa City police officer is developing a new concept to help police find more stolen property. The Gazette has a short report that officer David Schwindt, inspired by a forensics class, is working on L8NT, a specialized wireless dongle to help police officers locate stolen electronics (any of them with wireless capabilities and a MAC address, at least) by scanning for MAC addresses associated with stolen goods. The idea is to have police scan as they drive for these MAC entries, and match them against a database. The article notes a few shortcomings in this concept, but does not point out an even bigger one: MAC addresses are usually mutable, anyhow, in a way that's not as obvious as an obscured serial number, and thieves could refine their business model by automating the change.

2 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. The problem is actual recovery by spiritplumber · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've used find-my-phone type things a few times... the police don't care even if you can literally give them the thief's address. Every time it has been up to me and/or friends to enforce property rights, not the police.

    --
    Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
  2. Re:Most thieves are dumb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    For every thief that gets their face shown on a camera, there are a lot more who know enough to wear a hoodie.

    Even the meth-head looking to snatch a phone knows enough to stuff the device in a pouch made of tinfoil, wait a few days so the device runs out of battery, then takes it apart and parts it out (or sells it to a fence for a rock, and the fence does that.)
        Same with bike thieves -- they know frames have serial numbers that are recorded, but the latest Shimano shifting set doesn't, and can be tossed on eBay for about 90% new with nobody being the wiser.

    I see a few issues with a MAC sniffing device:

    1: There isn't a database of stolen MACs as there is with IMEIs.

    2: MACs can collide or be reused. There are a lot of machines out there that might have a different MAC because the software is license-locked to that ID, and the Ethernet card got toasted, of the machine was P2V-ed to save space.

    3: If it compares MACs, it can be used to log where MACs go, which is another tracking mechanism. Not good.

    Because there isn't an infrastructure for logging stolen MACs, nor there should be one, this is a pointless device.