Fingerprinting 802.11 drivers

The press release from Sandia describing their researchers' work is pretty dramatic: "someone just a few seats away could be breaking into your laptop and causing irreparable damage to your computer's operating system" and so on. But the actual paper describes a technique for determining what wireless driver is running the wifi radio in your laptop through passive listening. Now that information can then be used to target your machine for cracking by exploiting known vulnerabilities in that driver, but that's a separate problem.

My favorite bit is the picture, apparently illustrating the "red team" approach:

That guy in the striped shirt doesn't look at all suspicious. (I suppose this is a staged photograph intended to somehow illustrate the story, rather than an actual document of the research being conducted. Because to suppose otherwise would be insane.) Note also that Sandia offers a giant, half megabyte, 300 dpi version of this image for your free downloading pleasure, for some weird reason. Actually, I'm considering printing it out and putting it on my office wall.