Towards reliable spatial information in LBSNs
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
Information Security Tech. Report
On the importance of temporal dynamics in modeling urban activity
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing
Towards providing security for mobile games
Proceedings of the eighth ACM international workshop on Mobility in the evolving internet architecture
Crowd crawling: towards collaborative data collection for large-scale online social networks
Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks
The man who was there: validating check-ins in location-based services
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
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Location-based mobile social network services such as foursquare and Gowalla have grown exponentially over the past several years. These location-based services utilize the geographical position to enrich user experiences in a variety of contexts, including location-based searching and location-based mobile advertising. To attract more users, the location-based mobile social network services provide real-world rewards to the user, when a user checks in at a certain venue or location. This gives incentives for users to cheat on their locations. In this paper, we investigate the threat of location cheating attacks, find the root cause of the vulnerability, and outline the possible defending mechanisms. We use foursquare as an example to introduce a novel location cheating attack, which can easily pass the current location verification mechanism (e.g., cheater code of foursquare). We also crawl the foursquare website. By analyzing the crawled data, we show that automated large scale cheating is possible. Through this paper, we aim to call attention to location cheating in mobile social network services and provide insights into the defending mechanisms.