research-article

The man who was there: validating check-ins in location-based services

Authors:

Iasonas Polakis,

Stamatis Volanis,

Elias Athanasopoulos,

Evangelos P. MarkatosAuthors Info & Claims

ACSAC '13: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Pages 19 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/2523649.2523653

Published: 09 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The growing popularity of location-based services (LBS) has led to the emergence of an economy where users announce their location to their peers, indirectly advertising certain businesses. Venues attract customers through offers and discounts for users of such services. Unfortunately, this economy can become a target of attackers with the intent of disrupting the system for fun and, possibly, profit. This threat has raised the attention of LBS, which have invested efforts in preventing fake check-ins. In this paper, we create a platform for testing the feasibility of fake-location attacks, and present our case study of two popular services, namely Foursquare and Facebook Places. We discover their detection mechanisms and demonstrate that both services are still vulnerable. We implement an adaptive attack algorithm that takes our findings into account and uses information from the LBS at run-time, to maximize its impact. This strategy can effectively sustain mayorship in all Foursquare venues and, thus, deter legitimate users from participating. Furthermore, our experimental results validate that detection-based mechanisms are not effective against fake check-ins, and new directions should be taken for designing countermeasures. Hence, we implement a system that employs near field communication (NFC) hardware and a check-in protocol that is based on delegation and asymmetric cryptography, to eliminate fake-location attacks.

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Cited By

Dhondt KLe Pochat VDimova YJoosen WVolckaert SBalzarotti DXu W(2024)Swipe left for identity theftProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699183(5053-5070)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
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Yang HXia ZShin JHua JMao YZhong S(2024)A Comprehensive Study of Trajectory Forgery and Detection in Location-Based ServicesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.327341123:4(3228-3242)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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The man who was there: validating check-ins in location-based services

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ACSAC '13: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2013

374 pages

ISBN:9781450320153

DOI:10.1145/2523649

Conference Chair:
Charles N. Payne
Adventium Labs

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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ACSA: Applied Computing Security Assoc

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 December 2013

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Seventh Framework Programme

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ACSAC '13

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ACSA

ACSAC '13: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 9 - 13, 2013

Louisiana, New Orleans, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 497 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Dhondt KLe Pochat VDimova YJoosen WVolckaert SBalzarotti DXu W(2024)Swipe left for identity theftProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699183(5053-5070)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699183
Yang HXia ZShin JHua JMao YZhong S(2024)A Comprehensive Study of Trajectory Forgery and Detection in Location-Based ServicesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.327341123:4(3228-3242)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2023.3273411
Eryonucu CPapadimitratos PJadliwala MKim YDmitrienko A(2022)Sybil-Based Attacks on Google Maps or How to Forge the Image of City LifeProceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3507657.3528538(73-84)Online publication date: 16-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3507657.3528538
Yang HXia ZShin JHua JMao YZhong S(2022)Are You Moving as You Claim: GPS Trajectory Forgery and Detection in Location-Based Services2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00115(1166-1176)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00115
Khan SWoszczyk DYou CDemetriou SNaveed M(2021)Characterizing Improper Input Validation Vulnerabilities of Mobile Crowdsourcing ServicesProceedings of the 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3485832.3485888(944-956)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021
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Biehl JLee AFilby G(2019)Anchor of trust: towards collusion-resistant trusted indoor location for enterprise and industrial usePersonal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-019-01220-5Online publication date: 8-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-019-01220-5
El Moniem DMokhtar H(2019)Check2: A Framework for Fake Check-in DetectionIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-030-22868-2_1(1-12)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22868-2_1
Ding CWu TQiao TZheng NXu MWu YXia W(2019)A Location Spoofing Detection Method for Social Networks (Short Paper)Methionine Dependence of Cancer and Aging10.1007/978-3-030-12981-1_9(138-150)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2019
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Shaghaghi AKanhere SKaafar MBertino EJha S(2018)Gargoyle: A Network-based Insider Attack Resilient Framework for Organizations2018 IEEE 43rd Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2018.8638245(553-561)Online publication date: Oct-2018
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Agadakos IPolakis JPortokalidis GChoudhury TKo SCampbell AGanesan D(2017)TechuProceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3081333.3081345(475-487)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2017
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