NICPrint: Wi-Fi NIC Identification via Malformed Preambles


Cesar Arguello, Beatrice Perez, Timothy J. Pierson, and David Kotz. NICPrint: Wi-Fi NIC Identification via Malformed Preambles. Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). The Internet Society, March 2027. Accepted for publication.

Abstract:

Wi-Fi vulnerabilities are often tied to specific chipsets, yet identifying the chipset behind an observed MAC address from over-the-air transmission alone is an open problem. We present NICPrint, an identification system that recovers the manufacturer and chipset model of a Wi-Fi network interface (NIC) by remotely probing its digital reception logic. The IEEE 802.11 standard specifies what the Wi-Fi preamble must accom- plish but not how, leaving vendors free to make implementation choices in their PHY baseband designs. Without requiring network credentials, NICPrint elicits the resulting differences by transmitting frames with controlled preamble corruption and observes how NICs respond. We evaluate NICPrint on 25 devices spanning five major Wi-Fi vendors and four Wi-Fi generations. Surprisingly, NICPrint identifies chipsets with up to 99% accuracy. These results establish NICPrint as a practical tool for Wi-Fi reconnaissance.

Citable with [BibTeX]: \cite{arguello:nicprint}

Projects: [splice]

Keywords: [iot] [privacy] [security] [wifi]

Available from the author: [bib]
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[Kotz research]