Re: Google doing a distributed wardrive?

[Robin Wood <robin () digininja org>]

On 24 April 2011 18:50, 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 DaKahuna also
> 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.

I just tried this script with my MBP, my wifes phone and my own phone.
All three come down to the same lat/long which is the other side of
the city to where I am but at least gets the city right.

Robin
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