Enhancing WiFi Privacy: A Focus on Frame Anonymization Techniques

Recently, the WiFi community has focused on improving privacy measures, beginning with the introduction of randomized and changing MAC addresses (RCM) to mitigate privacy concerns during pre-association discovery (PAD) mechanisms. A significant advancement has been the establishment of the IEEE 802.11bi Task Group (TG), known as enhanced data privacy (EDP), which targets various aspects of privacy. Current EDP efforts concentrate on developing frame anonymization techniques to mitigate the issue of presence monitoring of associated STAs. This article provides an overview of these techniques, focusing on MAC address rotation schemes. Preliminary simulation results highlight the effectiveness of these schemes, although a dependency on the network scenario was observed. The performance analysis provides insights for future research to improve frame anonymization strategies.