IOS 7&8 support of MSE

[Sikkandar Basha]

My Question is regarding the IPhone devices specially above version 7. MSE use MACID to identify the location of the device. Apple recently announce it won't support UUID and MACID. Instead they plan for VendorId. In that case how MSE behave?  Through access point what is the mechanism to trace the device?

[David Watkins]

There are a couple of good articles online regarding the MAC randomization (see below).  Essentially, the device "may" use a random MAC, which the MSE can detect due to the custom MFG OUI bit informing the MSE it's a pseudo-mac.  The behavior will depend on the state of the device.  For devices "not" connected to WiFi, there is a chance that they will use the random mac, but not very frequently.  If using a random mac, yes specific "location" may be challenging, but for presence, you can actually configure the MSE to ignore the random MACs, such that presence stats are not skewed.  More often than not though, even when the device is not connected to Wi-Fi it will be probing with it's actual MAC address.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/mse/release/notes/mse8-0-110-0.html#pgfId-1439099 

For MAC randomization, the device must..

1. Not be connected to Wi-Fi

2. Be Sleeping

Now, once the device is actually connected to the Wi-Fi network, it will always use its normal hardware MAC address, so it becomes a mute point.

http://blog.airtightnetworks.com/ios8-mac-randomization-analyzed/

and

http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization

and

http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/apple-ios-8-and-mac-randomization-what-it-means-for-ciscos-connected-mobile-experiences-cmx-solution

[Sikkandar Basha]

Hi,

Thanks for the answer. Read the articles and it appear there is a bug in anti tracking capability of apple-:). i have couple of questions based on this
1) If apple fix this issue then we need to find alternative which may be significant impact in the app dev
2)  Though MSE can track the ios8 through actual MACADDRESS in active mode of device which connect to wifi, we need to get MACADDRESS from phone and send it to MSE to pull location information such as coordinates and for that we rely on IOS API which may give random MACID which is not really helpful....is there any solution for that?