The Digital Marauder's Map: A New Threat to Location Privacy

Abstract

The Marauder's Map" is a magical map in J. K. Rowling's fantasy series, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". It shows all moving objects within the "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry". This paper introduces a similar attack to location privacy in wireless networks. Our system, namely the digital Marauder's map, can reveal the locations of WiFi-enabled mobile devices within the coverage area of a single high-gain antenna. The digital Marauder's map is built solely with off-the-shelf wireless equipments, and features a mobile design that can be quickly deployed to a new location and instantly used without training. We present a comprehensive set of theoretical analysis and experimental results which demonstrate the coverage and localization accuracy of the digital Marauder's map.

3DLoc: Three Dimensional Wireless Localization Toolkit

“…Fortunately, in urban environments, it is usually possible for the authorities to find a position with such a close distance without alerting the criminal suspects. The antennas we use feature a gain of around 15dBi, which extends the line-ofsight distance to larger than 1, 000 meters [5].…”

“…Many cellular mobile networks also belong to this category, and allow the tracking of powered-on devices through the operator's base-transceiver stations. Indoor positioning systems include RADAR [24] [1], the digital Marauder's Map [5], Lighthouse [25], and VORBA [2]. All these systems position a mobile device based on the measured signal strength.…”

“…To avoid the infrastructural requirement, techniques [5] have been proposed to locate targets from a single point-of-operation by moving the positioning device or leveraging the WiFi infrastructure already existing in urban areas. Nonetheless, all these techniques require extensive training in the target area which is prohibitive for crime scene investigations.…”

“…Nonetheless, all these techniques require extensive training in the target area which is prohibitive for crime scene investigations. Existing publicly available WiFi access point (AP) position databases [6] maintain only 2D coordinates and cannot be used for positioning a mobile via intersecting the coverage areas of APs that are in range of the target in a 3D space [5]. Those techniques are not suitable for 3D positioning.…”

HAWK: An unmanned mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit for localization

“…It is able to sense a target mobile through its wireless signals, either cellular or WiFi. For instance, modern smartphones are often equipped with WiFi devices, which send out probing signals intermittently [3]. When we search and rescue a lost traveler or a survivor from building debris after an earthquake, we can position her by localizing her active smartphones via HAWK flying slowly at a low altitude.…”