Passive OS Fingerprinting Methods in the Jungle of Wireless Networks
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8406262 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/NOMS.2018.8406262 |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | OS fingerprinting;passive monitoring;IPFIX |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Operating system fingerprinting methods are well-known in the domain of static networks and managed environments. Yet few studies tackled this challenge in real networks, where users can bring and connect any device. We evaluate the performance of three OS fingerprinting methods on a large dataset collected from university wireless network. Our results show that method based on HTTP User-agents is the most accurate but can identify only low portion of the traffic. TCP/IP parameters method proved to be the opposite with high identification rate but low accuracy. We also implemented a new method based on detection of communication to OS-specific domains and its performance is comparable to the two established ones. After that, we discuss the impacts of traffic encryption and embracing new protocols such as IPv6 or HTTP/2.0 on OS fingerprinting. Our findings suggest that OS identification based on specific domain detection is viable and corresponds to the current directions of network traffic evolution, while methods based on TCP/IP parameters and User-agents will become ineffective in the future. |
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