Compromising Cloaking-based Location Privacy Preserving Mechanisms with Location Injection Attacks

Cloaking-based location privacy preserving mechanisms have been widely adopted to protect users' location privacy while traveling on road networks. However, a fundamental limitation of such mechanisms is that users in the system are inherently trusted and assumed to always report their true locations. Such vulnerability can lead to a new class of attacks called location injection attacks which can successfully break users’ anonymity among a set of users through the injection of fake user accounts and incorrect location updates. In this paper, we characterize location injection attacks and demonstrate their effectiveness through experiments on real-world geographic maps and discuss possible defense mechanisms to protect against such attacks. General Terms Security