In many urban areas, GPS doesn't work well. Buildings reflect GPS signals on themselves to create a confusing mess for phones to sort out. As a result, most modern devices determine their location using a blend of techniques, including nearby Wi-Fi networks. By using SkyLift to create fake networks known to be in other areas, we can manipulate where a device thinks it is with an ESP8266 microcontroller.
For devices with limited access to GPS, Wi-Fi networks are a reliable way of finding out where a device is located. Hackers can exploit the flaw by broadcasting signals that appear to be from known networks. While the tactic doesn't work in areas with a lot of other Wi-Fi networks or a clear GPS signal, it works very well in sites that force smart devices to rely on aGPS.
How Do Smart Devices Do Geolocation?
The problem of locating a device is not new, and most smart devices have a range of options besides GPS for determining where it's located. It can involve things like cell phone towers, which do not move and are useful for determining the relative location of a user. As demand for fast GPS devices began to increase, Assisted GPS, or aGPS, became a way for devices to get around the long signal acquisition time it took to get a traditional GPS lock.
To help with the problem of finding where a device with little or no GPS reception is, most smartphones continuously record the location of nearby Wi-Fi networks. These are added to a massive database of located networks that have been geolocated by multiple users, providing the information needed to determine where a device is ..
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