…second party can gain physical access to a user’s phone and enables Latitude without the owner’s knowledge…

if someone has physical access to your phone, they can do whatever they want without your knowledge. I am just not sure how this is any different than me taking your phone, installing a key sniffer and handing it back to you. Is there really a “Major Security Flaw” here?

Unfortunately, this was somewhat confusing.  The good thing out of all of this has been the focus.  Teasing out the feature into an addon prior to the release of a dot release did bring lots of discussions about geolocation that we probably would not have gotten if it was “just part of the release”.

In the above picture, the red arrow on Embarcadero Road and Middlefield Road is my precise location (around 37.4419, -122.1419). I explicitly plotted that location by hand (it wasn’t reported to the google maps api via geolocation). The bunch of blue markers in the upper left is what my ‘fuzzed’ location was reported as. There are a bunch the blue icons because I let this little webapp run for a bit. Now, this demo will not work in yet. I haven’t finished the fuzzing implementation in Firefox. However, here is what we are planning to do and I request that you comment here or in the bug 454488.

The basic threat is that the web application you are going to can figure out your precise location even when you have “fuzzed” your location.

The first thing we will do when starting up for the first time is to generate two random numbers. One will be a distance from your actual position, and the other number will be a direction. So, for me, in the above example, the displacement magnitude was 1503, and the direction was 139 (in degrees).

Now, these two numbers will never change, and the reason is that a website, if it sees enough of these displacement vectors, they can average them out and discover your real location. Not so good for “fuzzing”.

The second thing we do is that each and every time a location is passed to the web application, we add a bit of randomness to the displaced location. This results in the small cloud of blue dots you see above. What you can’t really see by this map is that the error field of the geolocation is pretty large. So, even though it is a pretty tight cluster, the webapp will see an error greater than the distance between the reported position and the actual position.

Other properties of the location such as altitude, speed, ect. will be zeroed out.

I hope that this helps a bit. Let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: geolocation, gps, location, mozilla