Mobile antitheft using device

hardware fingerprinting
Parshuram Parab #1, Vivek Jadhav #2, Komal Veer #3, Poonam
Pathak #4 #1 #2 #3
IT Students
#4
Assistant Professor
Pillai HOC College of Engineering and Technology
Mumbai University, Navi Mumbai

Abstract - Mobile phone thievery is one of the serious detected using triangulation technology. But this method
problem that our society faces. For a common non tech is used in very rare case like murders, large theft of
savvy user the exist no method to find / track / get property or something that will cause a critical risk to
status of stolen device. Victim can file a complaint to individual or country.
police authority or use utility provided by device OS like
find my device by google, but these methods will work The police have many important works then finding
only if email is registered with device. If the thief formats stolen or lost mobile devices also the telecom provider
the phone / installs ROM the method fails. Our solution gains no profit or incentives from detecting stolen
fixes the issue. devices.

Keywords – Antitheft, Mobile Phone There is no current solution in the market to track and
find stolen devices / lost devices most of the devices end
I. INTRODUCTION up in second hand market. All the parts of strip down
and sold to repairing shops in that case it becomes
Use of mobile phone has increased in last 5 years. The impossible to track these parts in the market.
number of people owning a smartphone has increased.
people who were normally using feature phone and now We have a solution that integrates with the phone
shifting towards smartphone and with the rise in the use which will help an individual to find his stolen phone.
of smartphone there has been rise in the theft of Unlike Google and Apple rather than providing a logical
smartphone. name like email ID to the device we are using the
hardware ID of the device which is the IMEI number.
There have been some research in the field of lost Now there are some techniques in which the IMEI
devices but most of them rely on sim card technology. number can be changed but with the release of the new
The thing about sim card is once it’s removed from the Android versions it has been difficult to do it.
device
then it's impossible to track that particular device using a Our solution also works but crowdsourcing the data
phone number. Second method to track the device by the problem off stolen phone can be e reduce only if the
using the service provided by the operating system of whole community acts on it.
the respected phone just for example Google has find
my device as a default service in the phone and there is
service similar to this on Apple iPhones but the problem
here is that these services rely on account from a II. LITERATURE REVIEW
particular device for example a device is linked to a The only option for common man is to file an FIR.
particular Gmail ID or a Gmail email address but in case First the user need to find the police station to report to if
the thief steals a phone and format it the email id linked the device is stolen in Kharghar and the user reports it to
to the particular device is also deleted from the phone. police station in panvel, the police in charge will not
There is the safeguard mechanism by Google that if accept that FIR. It has to be registered at the place
someone clean format the phone from recovery mode where the event has happen even after that there is no
the formatter should input old email id and password or guarantee that the user will get the stolen device.
the pattern lock side by the old user but it can be
III. EXISTING SYSTEM
bypassed by flashing the phone using fastboot mode and
after that the entire storage section off the phone is wiped User can also use a service called find my device.
along with the owners old data. User needs to login into the google account and after
that search google for find my device and after that go to
Tracking a mobile phone using IMEI number is possible find my device website from there user can check if the
but it requires permission from the police also this device is still sending location to google server. If the
method relies on the operator service. The operator will mobiles battery dies or if the thief formats the phone then
list its impossible to track the phone.
the phone as blacklisted and after that the phone can be
 Using government portal to find the device.
Government of India’s department of telecommunication
central equipment identity register has launched a
service for registering stolen devices but as discussed
above in the first point. The probability of finding the
device using this method is very less.
There are some third party app that pretends to track
the device but provides false data to lure user in paying
a premium amount to get more details but such
methods end up no where as most of them are not
verified and are hosted just to generate income from
fraudulent services.

Drawbacks of existing system–

The existing systems relies on third party like telecom
providers or a non-static ID like emails to track the
device. But most of the time thieves format the phone
through fastboot or install a ROM to by pass the
mechanism.

IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM

The proposed system is divided in 4 different Fig. 1 Flow Chart

phases Explained below:

1. User Registration: The user that has bought a new
phone or wishes to use system for first time will register
himself and the device to our app. Our app well get the
unique identifier IMEI and serial from the device. The
app will generate a fingerprint from the obtained
information using a hashing algorithm. The data that is
hashed is then sent to our server in a secured way. At
the server end the data is bounded with that particular
user account.
2. User Device Stolen: When the device gets stolen the
user can login to user panel using his credentials. Go to
user panel and mark the device as stolen. Servers
registers and saves the information in database for
broadcasting. Information is made public on the portal so Fig. 2 Functionality of system
that if anyone finds it he / she can report back. Results:

3. User buying second hand device: User buying the

second hand device first meets the seller in person and
then checks the phone. User visits website on site. User 1. Login
will enter IMEI and serial number on the website and
checks the status. In case if the device is flagged user
can instantly report it to the portal which will grab the
location of the reporter. This information is stored with
the server and is forwarded to the device owner.
4. User victim of repair scam: User equips the repaired
phone and after proper setup user installs the app. Our
app grabs the IMEI and serial number from the device
and checks the status on the database. In case if the
device is marked stolen the location of the user is
grabbed and sent to the server and the user gets
notified. After that user can take appropriate action.
 2. Signup

4. Management

5. Logs

3. Main Panel
 ROM itself so that the system remains intact even if the
device is cleaned flashed. We can also integrate the
service with different apps that are been used on a daily
basis. Doing this it will be impossible for the thief to sell
a stolen phone. If will also be helpful if government
promotes the use of the system as public will be aware
about the process to find and recover the device.

VII. REFENCES

[1] A Smart Phone Anti-theft Solution Based on

Locking Card of Mobile Phone (2011).
Yongqing Gao; Chunlai Zhou; Dan Shang.
DOI:
10.1109/ICCIS.2011.55, Print ISBN:978-1-
4577- 1540-2.
[2] Problems and Prospects of Anti-Theft and Mobile
Phone Tracking: A case in Nigeria (2019).
Iliyasu Yahaya Adam; Cihan Varol; Asaf Varol.
INSPEC Accession Number: 18821026. DOI:
10.1109/ISDFS.2019.8757527
[3] Anti-theft mobile phone security system with the
help of BIOS (2017). Abdul Waheed; Muhammad
Riaz; M. Yaqoob Wani. INSPEC Accession
Number: 17487932. DOI:
10.1109/ISWSN.2017.8250035
[4] IMEI access android:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1972381/
how -to-get-the-devices-imei-esn-
programmatically-in android/3976800
[5] Privileged Permission Allowlisting | Android
Open Source:
https://source.android.com/devices/tech/config/
per ms-allowlist

V. CONCLUSION
The system that we proposed will definitely make a
change in the society. The amount of recovery of lost /
stolen device will increase in numbers. Second hand
buyers can easily buy the phone while verifying its
source and original owner. It can be a very good
solution for tracking lost or stolen phones. The cost to
maintain the system is quite minimal and doesn’t require
any special requitement. Also, the data generated by
every device is repeated every 15
minutes so safety of location data is not so important
unlike user personal data which will be saved securely
on the server.

VI. FUTURE SCOPE

We can collaborate with the Original equipment

manufacturers of the device to integrate the system in