Re: Google doing a distributed wardrive?

[Adrian Crenshaw <irongeek () irongeek com>]

As a side note, I did find at least one case where I could find the location
of a phone by it's WiFi MAC address. If you have your phone set up to act as
an access point (WiFi tether for example), you can look up it's location.
Mine is reporting where it was during the AIDE conference.


Adrian

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Adrian Crenshaw <irongeek () irongeek com>wrote:

> The topic of Android phones reporting the access points they see back to
> Google interests me. I had been talking to Kevin Johnson about it just last
> week. Today I heard about Samy's project from ISD:
>
> http://samy.pl/androidmap
>
> But awhile back at Hack3con, DaKahuna showed me this script:
>
>
>  #!/bin/bash
> if [ $# != 1 ]; then
>         echo "# Google Gears WiFi Geolocation API query, by ShadowHatesYou"
>         echo "# shadow () squatthis net"
>
>         echo "#"
>         echo "# Use: $0 MAC "
>         echo "# $0 00-C0-26-A9-42-F7"
>         echo "#"
>         exit;
> fi;
>
> curl http://www.google.com/loc/json -H "Pragma: no-cache" -H "Cache-control: no-cache" -d "{ \"version\": \"1.1.0\", 
> \"host\": \"maps.google.com\", \"request_address\": true, \"address_language\": \"en_GB\", \"wifi_towers\": [ { 
> \"mac_address\": \"$1\", \"signal_strength\": 8, \"age\": 0 } ] }"
>
>
>
> It apparently ties a MAC address to a geo-location.  When he put in the
> MAC address for my class router, he was able to find it's location when I
> had it on down in Atlanta (I doubt a Google streets car just happened to be
> going by at that time). Unfortunatly, I'd sometimes get bad results from the
> script above (it would use my current IP instead of the MAC I gave it to do
> the geo location), maybe Samy's stuff will work better.
>
> Geo locating the router is not such a big deal I suppose, but DaKahunaalso said he was able to pic up the location of 
> an Android phone if he knew
> it's MAC address. Anyone care to test this for me? Might be interesting if
> you could track someones location only be seeing their MAC address once. All
> I've been able to replicate is the location of a router MAC.
>
> Thanks,
> Adrian
>
> --
> "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." ~ W. Somerset
> Maugham



-- 
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." ~ W. Somerset
Maugham

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