Exploiting Social Navigation
This exposes a critical vulnerability in widely used social navigation systems, potentially affecting millions of drivers.
The researchers demonstrated a Sybil attack against social location-based services like Waze by creating bot drivers with fake GPS reports, which could fake traffic jams and influence routing decisions for over 50 million users.
We present an effective Sybil attack against social location based services. Our attack is based on creating a large number of reputed "bot drivers", and controlling their reported locations using fake GPS reports. We show how this attack can be used to influence social navigation systems by applying it to Waze - a prominent social navigation application used by over 50 million drivers. We show that our attack can fake traffic jams and dramatically influence routing decisions. We present several techniques for preventing the attack, and show that effective mitigation likely requires the use of additional carrier information.