Paper Info
Title
Mobile location tracking in metro areas: malnets and others
Abstract
Digital wireless radios broadcast identification numbers that uniquely identify them. As has been previously observed, given the ubiquity with which people carry smartphones with their embedded WiFi radios powered on, comes the ability to track individuals' movements. The ability to use wireless radios for positioning has been previously observed and developed in to useful products. In these systems a user willingly geolocates themselves by providing identifiers to infrastructure hardware. In this paper we consider the converse question: what rates of monitoring by smartphones devices in a given metropolitan area are necessary to achieve different levels of involuntary geolocation. While previous work has looked at countermeasure that attempt to maintain privacy, no work has attempted to quantify the problem and risks. Using appropriate simulations we give the first quantitative support for the number and conditions of tracking devices necessary to track the locations of non-participant individuals in urban environments. We provide evidence that a small, but not insignificant, number of mobile devices can be used to track a majority of users during a significant fraction of their travel with current devices. We conclude that in the immediate future, malnets would require relatively high infection rates to pose a significant threat, but that voluntary networks, with perceived benefit can probably achieve the usage rates necessary to track individual movements of non-subscribed users to a high-degree of accuracy. Our results also suggest ubiquitous deployment of 802.11n in smartphones would make geolocation feasible by malnets
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1866307.1866318
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
involuntary geolocation,digital wireless radio,mobile location tracking,significant fraction,metro area,smartphones device,appropriate simulation,converse question,wireless radio,previous work,significant threat,identification number,geolocation,simulation,wifi,privacy,mobile device
Countermeasure,Converse,Broadcasting,Internet privacy,Software deployment,Wireless,Identifier,Computer science,Computer security,Geolocation,Mobile device
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
26
1.54
31
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nathaniel Husted1594.25
Steven Myers225317.61