Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery

Yuan Ding; Sai Teja Peddinti; Keith W. Ross

doi:10.1145/2666620.2666625

Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery

Yuan Ding, Sai Teja Peddinti, Keith W. Ross

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

The rise of smart phone usage has led to an increase in the number of applications that make use of the users' locations. One popular class of such applications is location-based social discovery (LBSD), which enables users to discover others nearby and then communicate. In this paper, we show how LBSD applications can be exploited by even weak adversaries to stalk LBSD users in any city from any location in the world. We develop an automated measurement methodology{combining faking longitude and latitude locations, smart phone emulation, task automation, and optical character recognition (OCR){that can be adapted to any LBSD service without relying on an application programming interface (API) or on reverse engineering. Although our approach is generic, we focus our study on We Chat, a popular social network. We design a scheme that can determine a discovered user's location to a narrow region. By monitoring mid-town Manhattan for seven days, we gather location information pertaining to 1745 distinct users moving in the targeted geographical region.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	75-80
Number of pages	6
Edition	November
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450331555
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/2666620.2666625
State	Published - Nov 7 2014
Event	4th ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, SPSM 2014, Held in Association with the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2014 - Scottsdale, United States Duration: Nov 7 2014 → …

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Number	November
Volume	2014-November
ISSN (Print)	1543-7221

Other

Other	4th ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, SPSM 2014, Held in Association with the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2014
Country/Territory	United States
City	Scottsdale
Period	11/7/14 → …

Keywords

Discover
Framework
Generic
Location
Privacy
Social networks
Stalk
We chat

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Computer Networks and Communications

Access to Document

10.1145/2666620.2666625

Cite this

Ding, Y., Peddinti, S. T., & Ross, K. W. (2014). Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery. In SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014 (November ed., pp. 75-80). (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security; Vol. 2014-November, No. November). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2666620.2666625

Stalking Beijing from timbuktu : A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery. / Ding, Yuan; Peddinti, Sai Teja; Ross, Keith W.

SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014. November. ed. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 75-80 (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security; Vol. 2014-November, No. November).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Ding, Y, Peddinti, ST & Ross, KW 2014, Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery. in SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014. November edn, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, no. November, vol. 2014-November, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 75-80, 4th ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, SPSM 2014, Held in Association with the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2014, Scottsdale, United States, 11/7/14. https://doi.org/10.1145/2666620.2666625

Ding Y, Peddinti ST, Ross KW. Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery. In SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014. November ed. Association for Computing Machinery. 2014. p. 75-80. (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security; November). https://doi.org/10.1145/2666620.2666625

Ding, Yuan ; Peddinti, Sai Teja ; Ross, Keith W. / Stalking Beijing from timbuktu : A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery. SPSM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Smartphones and Mobile Devices, Co-located with CCS 2014. November. ed. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. pp. 75-80 (Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security; November).

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Stalking Beijing from timbuktu: A generic measurement approach for exploiting location-based Social Discovery

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Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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