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How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

manas.tech

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Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#41

Post by JCharante »

smortaz wrote: post #10

not directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path). Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.

You might not want to mount your phone on the handlebar. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230198

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#42

Post by lxgr »

janus wrote: post #39

Ha, last winter I lost my phone while snowboarding in the last 300-500m before mountain base. I noticed because I was listening to music with my airpods when I got to the bottom the music had gone silent. Thankfully I had my Apple watch with me, so I immediately got off the board and start running uphill while incessantly spamming the "ping my phone" button. At some point I saw in the watch screen it briefly connecte…

My friend was able to retrieve his phone that had just been pickpocketed out of his backpack that way!

"Hey, did you just grab my phone" can take some courage to say to a stranger; "Hey, I can hear my phone ringing in your bag when I press this button!" was much more convincing.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#43

Post by willcipriano »

askvictor wrote: post #28

What's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi? I had assumed since they use the same frequency, and usually the same chip and antenna, they would be much the same (perhaps there are regulatory differences between them?) If anything, I'd guess that BLE would be more useful in this case as there is less handshaking, which means on a very poor connection you've got more of a chance of getting some…

> What's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi?

Big in my experience. 15 - 20 feet vs 100+ feet for wifi out in the open like that.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#45

Post by Jeremy1026 »

JCharante wrote: post #41
smortaz wrote: post #10

not directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path). Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.

You might not want to mount your phone on the handlebar. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230198

It might also fall off while riding on a bumpy trail and be lost forever unless you have a backup phone in your backpack.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#46

Post by lxgr »

marcod wrote: post #4

So, there is no security feature that prevents a phone from connecting to a cloned wifi network??

There's not really such thing as a cloned wifi network conceptually: If you set up a new access point using the same SSID and encryption settings, you didn't clone a network – you just extended it by one more access point/location where it's available!

A Wi-Fi network is the abstract concept of "all access points using the same name and passphrase", not an individual instance of an access point.

If you connect the two access points (e.g. using wired Ethernet), clients can actually roam between the two fairly seamlessly without any other setup required, and this even works across brands!

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#47

Post by JCharante »

marcod wrote: post #4

So, there is no security feature that prevents a phone from connecting to a cloned wifi network??

Enterprise networking hardware has protections against this by attacking other access points. Example from cisco: https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless/wlc-quot-rogue-conta...

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#48

Post by jeroenhd »

marcod wrote: post #4

So, there is no security feature that prevents a phone from connecting to a cloned wifi network??

Either "enterprise" WiFi or, if your device supports it, locking down the MAC address. That'll give you range issues if you use mesh wifi, range extenders, or additional access points, though.

I don't know why more devices don't support WPA Enterprise, it's not _that_ complicated a protocol. I can imagine a "secure router" product with a normal WPA3 network for management and an "enterprise" network with a simple username/password list selling quite well in some niche circles.

You can build such a network yourself, though, with almost any OpenWRT device, though it's clearly not something most end users can manage themselves: https://github.com/ouaibe/howto/blob/master/OpenWRT/802.1xOn...

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#49

Post by lxgr »

namibj wrote: post #30
flashback2199 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the SSID and password are the same, how would the phone tell the difference MAC address, but devices don't care, by design they will connect if the SSID and encryption type are the same, actually, you can create a mesh wifi network at your house with regular routers or access points by doing so, connecting them with wired ethernet.

ESSID != BSSID. The former meant for UX, the latter to uniquely identify. Wpa_didn't allows fixing the latter, for example, as needed when you hang out at multiple locations where the wifi has the default ESSID, but of course with distinct passwords. Causes authentication timeout/lockout annoyance if left alone.

That's a pretty annoying situation, yes.

Fortunately many default network names at least contain some randomness these days, e.g. three bytes of an access point's BSSID, to make this less likely.

That's also the proper fix – pinning a WPA password to an individual BSSID would go against the concept of encryption being scoped to an ESS/ESSID, not individual APs.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#50

Post by dharmab »

lxgr wrote: post #40
WanderPanda wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to nitpick but I think you mean trilaterate ;)

If we're being nitpicky it was probably neither – multilateration requires taking multiple measurements, drawing circles/lines of equal signal strength (or timing advance) and then intersecting these. If you just want to home in on a transmitter, there's a much simpler algorithm: Try walking into various directions and keep heading into the one that makes the signal strength nunber go up :) Not sure if there's a name…

Direction finding! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding
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