Learning to Link: Automatic Re-identification of BLE Devices Under MAC Address Randomisation

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) employs MAC address randomisation – via Resolvable Private Address (RPA) – to mitigate long-term de- vice tracking on public advertising channels. Existing research has shown that advertising packets contain metadata and structural fea- tures that allow re-identifying a target device via manually crafted rules. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of automating the process of tracking BLE devices despite MAC randomisation by leveraging machine learning algorithms for the signature creation. Based on the actual Bluetooth traffic from target devices, we char- acterise the persistence of advertising-layer features across RPA changes and formulate device linkage as a supervised classifica- tion problem. Using simple decision tree classifiers as a proof-of- feasibility approach, we evaluate the distinguishability of target and non-target devices under varying address rotation patterns. Our results reinforce prior work demonstrating that advertising- layer metadata can enable device re-identification under MAC ran- domisation, to the point where such linkage can be automated using standard supervised learning techniques, without any spe- cific knowledge of the technology.