Abstract

Location spoofing attack deceiving a Wi-Fi positioning system has been studied for over a decade. However, it has been challenging to construct a practical spoofing attack in urban areas with dense coverage of legitimate Wi-Fi APs. This paper identifies the vulnerability of the Google Geolocation API, which returns the location of a mobile device based on the information of the Wi-Fi access points that the device can detect. We show that this vulnerability can be exploited by the attacker to reveal the black-box localization algorithms adopted by the Google Wi-Fi positioning system and easily launch the location spoofing attack in dense urban areas with a high success rate. Furthermore, we find that this vulnerability can also lead to severe consequences that hurt user privacy, including the leakage of sensitive information like precise locations, daily activities, and demographics. Ultimately, we discuss the potential countermeasures that may be used to mitigate this vulnerability and location spoofing attack.

Department(s)

Computer Science

Publication Status

Public Access

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant 1553304

Keywords and Phrases

geolocation apis; localization attacks; wi-fi localization

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-145039450-5

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1543-7221

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

07 Nov 2022

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