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) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Pages | 75-80 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Volume | 2014-November |
Edition | November |
DOIs | |
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 → … |
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 |
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Country | 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