Active Behavioral Fingerprinting of Wireless Devices

The authors propose a simple active method for discovering facts about the chipset, the firmware or the driver of an 802.11 wireless device by observing its responses (or lack thereof) to a series of crafted non-standard or malformed 802.11 frames. They demonstrate that such responses can differ significantly enough to distinguish between a number of popular chipsets and drivers. They expect to significantly expand the number of recognized device types through community contributions of signature data for the proposed open fingerprinting framework.