Invasion of location privacy using online map services and smartphone sensors

Hyunsoo Kim, Youngbae Jeon, Ji Won Yoon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Smartphone sensors potentially threaten the privacy of individuals, placing society at risk. Previous studies have demonstrated that smartphone sensors are susceptible to privacy intrusion. Inspired by this finding, we designed a mechanism of invasion that targets the location privacy of subway passengers. Specifically, we recovered the travel trajectories of subway passengers using sensor data and matched them with railway data collected from OpenStreetMap. This study primarily exploits an accelerometer and gyroscope, which are suitable for subway tracking because they operate appropriately in underground and indoor conditions. Although these sensors are easily influenced by passenger activity, we devised a method for recovering clean trajectories of subway passengers by utilizing gravitational acceleration and event detection methods. Subsequently, we conducted several experiments to prove the threat and feasibility of our proposals, even in the presence of human-generated noise (e.g., texting, watching videos, playing games, device rotation, and changing positions) influencing the sensor data. Specifically, we applied dynamic time warping (DTW) to obtain the costs between the reference data and reconstructed trace. Finally, a cost combination mechanism aggregated the DTW costs and predicted the best matches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASIA CCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages41-52
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798400700989
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023 Jul 10
Event18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ASIA CCS 2023 - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: 2023 Jul 102023 Jul 14

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ASIA CCS 2023
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period23/7/1023/7/14

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 ACM.

Keywords

  • Covert channel attack
  • Location inference
  • Sensor data processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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