CRAWDAD hope/nh_amd

RFID tracking data was collected at The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference that was held July 16-18, 2010. Conference attendees received active RFID badges that uniquely identified and tracked them across the conference space.

last modified :

2011-03-12

release date :

2010-07-18

date/time of measurement start :

2010-07-16

date/time of measurement end :

2010-07-18

collection environment :

Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, New York City, the site of the biannual 
"Hackers on Planet Earth" (HOPE) conference.

network configuration :

This record comes from three days of the conference, by TCPDump from OpenBeacon
PoE receivers.  Each UDP packet represents one radio packet, as forwarded from 
the receiver to an aggregation server.  Positions may be inferred from the 
packet error rate at a given receiver, as well as the broadcast signal strength
which is included as a field of the packet.

data collection methodology :

Data was collected using tcpdump on an aggregation server. The packets exist in
their raw state, with no preprocessing of any kind.

sanitization :

The only unique information contained within a badge is its serial number,
which was optionally correlated with an attendee's name or handle by a social 
networking site. The database of the social networking site has not been 
included in this database, and it is believed that no private information was 
included. Additionally, attendees received badges separately from batteries, 
being told to insert the battery only if the collection of data was not a 
problem.

limitation :

The packet capture is known to be somewhat damaged -- in particular, the last
bzip2 block is corrupt ("file ends unexpectedly") and the contained pcap stream
therefore does not parse correctly ("pcap_loop: bogus savefile header").  The
aggregation machine was rather violently brought offline (somebody tripped over
its power cable during cleanup; happens to the best of us). We thought it 
better to just release everything as we got it than try any processing to clean
it up.

Traceset

hope/nh_amd/tcpdump

Packets generated by the badges at The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference held July 16-18, 2010.

• description: RFID tracking data was collected at The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference that was held July 16-18, 2010. Conference attendees received active RFID badges that uniquely identified and tracked them across the conference space.
• measurement purpose: User Mobility Characterization, Positioning Systems, Educational Use, Location-aware Computing, Human Behavior Modeling, Energy-efficient Wireless Network, Network Security, Localization, Opportunistic Connectivity
• methodology: We collected three days worth of packets sent by conference attendees badges to the aggregator.
• last modified: 2011-02-22
• dataname: hope/nh_amd/tcpdump
• version: 20100718
• change: the initial version.
• release date: 2010-07-18
• date/time of measurement start: 2010-07-16
• date/time of measurement end: 2010-07-18

hope/nh_amd/tcpdump Traces

• bz2: Packets generated by the badges at The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference held July 16-18, 2010.

• configuration: The conference badges were sending packets to the aggregation server.
• format: The collection contains the following files. capture**.bz2 : The packet archive itself, split into 33 pcap files and bzip2'd. README : Description of the collection and links to relevant tools. HOWTO_RUN_ME : The commands used to bring up the estimator and the Cassandra bridge. areaspt.txt : A Space Partition Tree file mapping positions onto area name. See localizer/spaceparttree.h for format documentation. readers.txt : A map from reader IPv4 address to its position in space. Coordinates, left to right, are X and Y in meters and Z in floors. The origin is the corner with the hammock space. Y increases towards the operations center. The coordinate system is left-handed.
• description: This is the working directory of the OpenAMD project's estimator from The Next Hope, as well as the complete packet dump for obtained during our collection. The collection starts at Friday 12:23:34.714999 and ends at Sunday 16:04:53.403616. It contains, all told, 200123338 packets. Almost all of these are well-formed packets from TNH badges; there are known to be some TLH badges in there (which the localizer knows how to decrypt) and maybe some surprises. Just for clarity, the aggregator was only ever on the private VLAN for the readers, so there should be no attendee data (i.e. only attendee metadata ^^) in this file.
• last modified: 2011-02-22
• dataname: hope/nh_amd/tcpdump/bz2
• version: 20100718
• change: the initial version
• release date: 2010-07-18
• date/time of measurement start: 2010-07-16
• date/time of measurement end: 2010-07-18