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ZeroTrace AirLeak

Introduction

Passive RF leakage capture for the room around you

Welcome to ZeroTrace AirLeak

ZeroTrace AirLeak is a passive RF capture tool. It listens to every WiFi management frame and BLE advertisement in range and tells you what's broadcasting around you, names, models, vendors, OS versions, paired-device states, probed-network history, privacy-leakage signals, and more.

A small ESP32-S3-based capture unit handles the radio work. You connect it to a computer over USB-C, open the ZeroTrace Desktop App, and start capturing. The unit ships pre-configured and pre-flashed, plug, click Monitor, see what's around you.


What it does in one paragraph

The unit sweeps every 2.4 GHz WiFi channel and runs a continuous BLE active scan. Each captured frame is decoded into a structured event: probe-requests, beacons, BLE advertisements, scan responses, association attempts, and deauthentications, with full RSN / AKM / MFP parsing for WiFi and full Apple Continuity / Find My / Tile / Eddystone / vendor-payload decoding for BLE. Every observation feeds a live device aggregator with a multi-signal classifier that boils all that down to what the device actually is, iPhone, AirPods Pro 2, Galaxy Watch 5, Samsung TV, AirTag, Tile, smart-home sensor, etc. The desktop app receives the live stream, persists every observation, runs privacy alerts, and presents it all in a fast, filterable, per-device-detail UI.


Core capabilities

  • Dual-radio passive capture, WiFi 2.4 GHz channel hopping + BLE 5.0 scan, simultaneously
  • Active BLE scan with friendly-name capture, captures device names that passive-only tools miss
  • 150+ recognized device classes, Apple ecosystem fully decoded, plus Android phones, smart TVs, headphones, fitness trackers, item finders, IoT sensors, vehicles, smart locks, robot vacuums, drones, e-bikes, retail beacons
  • Privacy-leak detection, AirDrop discoverable, Find My separated, corporate / PII SSID in probe-requests, multi-hour MAC followers, separated SmartTags
  • WiFi crypto inspection, full RSN parse with cipher, AKM, MFP, country, BSS load, 802.11r / 802.11k support flags
  • Live event stream, per-event delivery to the desktop with sub-second latency
  • Session recording, every capture auto-saved, replayable, exportable
  • Cross-session library, devices remembered across reboots, fingerprint-keyed, MAC-rotation-tolerant
  • Heartbeat diagnostics, heap, uptime, scan state, drop rate, throttle stats
  • Persistent settings, active scan, scan timing, capture mode all survive reboot

What you get out of the box

Each unit ships:

  • Hand-assembled and tested
  • Pre-flashed with the latest firmware
  • Default capture settings tuned for typical environments
  • External-antenna ready (WROOM-1U variant), 3 dBi dipole bundled in the box

Use cases

  • Personal threat-surface audit, what does your phone broadcast about you? Your laptop? Your headphones?
  • Room sweep, what trackers, watches, or unknown devices are in this space?
  • Travel privacy, airport / hotel WiFi survey, AirTag-following detection
  • Conference room sanity check, open networks, devices broadcasting hostnames, BLE peripherals advertising
  • Security research, passive RF leakage characterization of consumer devices
  • Vendor engineering, verify a product isn't leaking PII in its BLE advertisements

Authorized use only

ZeroTrace AirLeak captures publicly broadcast RF only, no decryption, no probing of authenticated services. Even so, legal frameworks for passive RF capture vary by jurisdiction. Operate in environments you own or have explicit permission to monitor. See Privacy & Legal for the full picture.