Your MAC Address Can be Detected Easily When Your Smartphone Connected to the Wi-Fi

In this short paper, we prove that smartphones connected to Wi-Fi can be detected (scanned) easily with a Raspberry Pi help. According to the observation, the smartphone eventually broadcasts some packets of data containing MAC layers data. The period of broadcasting data depends on the smartphone’s state (active scanning/sleep). Besides MAC layers data, we also detect/capture other parameters, i.e., wireless signature data transmitted by smartphone (RSSI) and Time-stamp. The RSSI value measured in this test has a range from –30 dBm to –80 dBm. The result proves that different smartphones give different RSSI values (each smartphone emits different power strength). The RSSI value has more significant changes in a short-range (in this test result, 1 to 10 meters) and less significant change in a long-distance (above 20 meters). MAC address, time-stamp, and RSSI scanned/captured successfully through Raspberry Pi from the smartphones can be used as a reference for various purposes/applications in future work, such as Wi-Fi scanning/tracking system.