Title
No Place to Hide that Bytes won't Reveal: Sniffing Location-Based Encrypted Traffic to Track User Position.
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.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
International conference on network and system security
Byte,World Wide Web,Large networks,Computer science,Computer security,Sniffing,Location-based service,Encryption,Mobile device,Adversary,Distributed computing,The Internet
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1505.07774
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
5
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giuseppe Ateniese14380254.66
Briland Hitaj21084.49
Luigi V. Mancini31552124.22
Nino Vincenzo Verde429715.02
Antonio Villani5837.54