Attacking and Defending Deep-Learning-Based Off-Device Wireless Positioning Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores vulnerabilities in off-device wireless positioning systems that use deep learning, demonstrating effective on-device attacks and discussing potential defenses to enhance location privacy.

Contribution

It introduces on-device attack methods against deep-learning-based off-device positioning systems and evaluates their effectiveness using real-world data.

Findings

On-device attacks can accurately compromise off-device positioning systems.

Proposed attacks remain compliant with communication standards and minimally impact QoS.

Defenses can mitigate attack effectiveness but face limitations.

Abstract

Localization services for wireless devices play an increasingly important role in our daily lives and a plethora of emerging services and applications already rely on precise position information. Widely used on-device positioning methods, such as the global positioning system, enable accurate outdoor positioning and provide the users with full control over what services and applications are allowed to access their location information. In order to provide accurate positioning indoors or in cluttered urban scenarios without line-of-sight satellite connectivity, powerful off-device positioning systems, which process channel state information (CSI) measured at the infrastructure base stations or access points with deep neural networks, have emerged recently. Such off-device wireless positioning systems inherently link a user's data transmission with its localization, since accurate CSI measurements are necessary for reliable wireless communication -- this not only prevents the users from controlling who can access this information but also enables virtually everyone in the device's range to estimate its location, resulting in serious privacy and security concerns. We therefore propose on-device attacks against off-device wireless positioning systems in multi-antenna orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems while remaining standard compliant and minimizing the impact on quality-of-service, and we demonstrate their efficacy using real-world measured datasets for cellular outdoor and wireless LAN indoor scenarios. We also investigate defenses to counter such attack mechanisms, and we discuss the limitations and implications on protecting location privacy in existing and future wireless communication systems.