Abstract
Geographical social networks (GSN) is an emerging research area. For example, Foursquare, Yelp, and WeChat are all well-known service providers in this field. These applications are also known as location-based services (LBS). Previous studies have suggested that these location-based services may expose user location information. In order to ensure the privacy of the user’s location data, the service provider may provide corresponding protection mechanisms for its applications, including spatial cloaking, fuzzy location information, etc., so that the user’s real location cannot be easily cracked. It has been shown that if the positioning data provided by the user is not accurate enough, it is still difficult for an attacker to obtain the user’s true location. Taking this factor into consideration, our attack method is divided into two stages for the entire attack process: (1) Search stage: cover the area where the targeted user is located with unit discs, and then calculate the minimum dominating set. Use the triangle positioning method to find the minimum precision disc. (2) Inference phase: Considering the existence of errors, an Error-Adjusted Space Partition Attack Algorithm (EASPAA) was proposed during the inference phase. Improved the need for accurate distance information to be able to derive the user’s true location. In this study, we focus on the Location Sharing Mechanism with Maximal Coverage Limit to implement the whole attack. Experimental results show that the proposed method still can accurately infer the user’s real location even when there is an error in the user’s location information.
Highlights
Due to the rapid development of the Internet, social networks can further share each other’s geographical information, so they can be called Geosocial Networks (GSNs)
Because almost all mobile devices are equipped with Internet connectivity and location awareness, GSNs providers are able to get users’ location information through GPS
In order to prevent the misuse of location information, many location privacy protection mechanisms based on shared location services have been proposed [6], including the use of encrypted distance information exchange protocols, obfuscation of distance information, generation of cloaking regions or virtual user locations, etc
Summary
Due to the rapid development of the Internet, social networks can further share each other’s geographical information, so they can be called Geosocial Networks (GSNs). In order to prevent the misuse of location information, many location privacy protection mechanisms based on shared location services have been proposed [6], including the use of encrypted distance information exchange protocols, obfuscation of distance information, generation of cloaking regions or virtual user locations, etc. These privacy protection mechanisms can effectively resist the attack methods proposed by scholars in some cases [7,8], they are still some space for improvements.
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