Abstract:

Location-based social network service (LBSNS) is widely considered to be the important trend of social networking services in the future. LBSNS combines the information sharing with location, which greatly enriches the people’s mobile social contents. However, because the location information is associated with the objective world, location sharing in LBSNS may disclose the identity information of the user. For the hidden danger, this paper proposes a privacy attack based on location cheating. The attack firstly adopts the Aircrack-ng and MDK3 tools to forge the AP, which deceives the target user’s location to a specified location. Then, the identity information of the target user is obtained by using the particularity of the specified location and the characteristic of information sharing in social network. The paper analyzes the principle and implementation steps of the privacy attack, and validates the attack in some mainstream social network applications. Validation shows that the attack can get the digital identity information of the user, which leads to disclosure of user privacy.

Key words: location-based social network, WiFi location system, location cheating, privacy attack