1.10 Anonymization

wipal-anonymize is a program to anonymize IEEE 802.11 traces. It takes one input and one output: the filename of the trace to anonymize, and the filename of the anonymous trace to produce. The output contains the same frames as the input with the following modifications:

• NIC specific parts of MAC addresses are anonymized.
• ESSIDs are anonymized with a prefix-preserving scheme. For instance, a valid anonymization could map ‘operator-4251’, ‘operator-DODO’, and ‘foobar’ to ‘abcdefgh*x0yz’, ‘abcdefgh*9876’, and ‘zxycba’. The anonymization scheme also preserves character classes, i.e. alpha-numerical characters are anonymized to other alpha-numerical characters, printable characters stay printable, and ASCII extended characters (128 to 256) stay extended.
• Data frames are truncated so the output only contains MAC headers.

wipal-anonymize stores valid-to-anonymous MAC and ESSID mappings into files so these mappings can be re-used latter. wipal-anonymize also reads these file at start-up when they exist. This enables the creation of distinct anonymous traces with consistent MAC addresses and ESSIDs. By default these mapping files' names are MAC.map and ESSID.map. Use the -m and -s options to change this. See Available options.