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	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	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 → …

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	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

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

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. Vol. 2014-November November. ed. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 75-80.

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 Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. November edn, 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

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