A Defense Mechanism against Location Cheating Attack in Social Network

With the gradual popularity of location-based social network service, the localization technologies, for example the WLAN-based positioning technique, have become the premise of the service. Nevertheless, the positioning system is vulnerable to spoofing attack resulting in the user's identity divulged, due to the openness of the wireless network. The paper firstly implements a location cheating attack by means of fake base stations to make the device locate to the specific position, which illustrates the potential risk of leakage of the user's private information. And then a mechanism is proposed to resist the attack by extracting the Access Point (AP) frames to construct corresponding AP tag and verifying the AP tag's consistency with its unpredictability, which can improve the robustness of terminal positioning. Finally, the security of the defense method is analyzed from the theoretical aspects.