No Place to Hide that Bytes Won’t Reveal: Sniffing location-based encrypted traffic to track a user’s position

Giuseppe Ateniese, Briland Hitaj, Luigi Vincenzo Mancini, Nino Vincenzo Verde, Antonio Villani

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

News reports of the last few years indicated that several intelligence agencies are able to monitor large networks or entire portions of the Internet backbone. Such a powerful adversary has only recently been considered by the academic literature. In this paper, we propose a new adversary model for Location Based Services (LBSs). The model takes into account an unauthorized third party, different from the LBS provider itself, that wants to infer the location and monitor the movements of a LBS user. We show that such an adversary can extrapolate the position of a target user by just analyzing the size and the timing of the encrypted traffic exchanged between that user and the LBS provider. We performed a thorough analysis of a widely deployed location based app that comes pre-installed with many Android devices: GoogleNow. The results are encouraging and highlight the importance of devising more effective countermeasures against powerful adversaries to preserve the privacy of LBS users.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNetwork and System Security - 9th International Conference, NSS 2015, Proceedings
EditorsShouhuai Xu, Meikang Qiu, Haibo Zhang, Moti Yung
Pages46-59
Number of pages14
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Event9th International Conference on Network and System Security, NSS 2015 - New York, United States
Duration: 3 Nov 20155 Nov 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9408
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Network and System Security, NSS 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period3/11/155/11/15

Keywords

  • GoogleNow
  • Location-based services
  • Mobile devices
  • Network traffic analysis
  • Privacy

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