Trilateration Method Locates Hornet App Users Down to Few Meters

In a recent report by Check Point Research, the privacy and security implications of geolocation features in dating app Hornet have been scrutinized, revealing significant risks associated with using such functionalities.

The investigation focused on the Hornet dating app, which has 10 million downloads on the Android platform. Despite the app developers' efforts to safeguard user locations, Check Point found that it is vulnerable to trilateration attacks that could pinpoint a user's location with alarming precision.

The study evaluated the security measures of two popular gay dating apps previously highlighted for potential geolocation privacy issues. These apps allow users to turn off distance displays, aiming to protect their privacy. The analysis revealed significant differences in how these apps handle location data.

One app anonymizes location data by rounding coordinates and encoding them, while the other, Hornet, claims to safeguard user locations by randomizing displayed distances and allowing users to hide their distance entirely. However, the research found Hornet's measures to be initially inadequate, allowing for the precise determination of user locations.

Locating Hornet users

The researchers employed a sophisticated methodology involving the creation of additional accounts to manipulate their displayed location, thus enabling them to estimate the distance to a target user with high accuracy. Despite Hornet's efforts to randomize distance information, the study demonstrated that it was possible to determine a user's location within a few meters through trilateration, leveraging the distances between users displayed by the app.

The researchers demonstrated how the trilateration technique could exploit the distance information provided by the app to calculate a user's exact coordinates. This method involves determining the distance to the target from three different locations and using this information to triangulate the target's position. The experiments conducted by the researchers achieved location accuracy within 10 meters before Hornet's developers made changes to reduce location accuracy to 50 meters, thereby mitigating the risks to some extent.

This level of precision poses a significant risk for users of those apps, especially in regions where LGBTQ+ rights are not protected, by potentially exposing users' locations to those with harmful intentions.

Check Point concludes with a cautionary note on the vulnerabilities inherent in sharing geolocation data through dating apps. It also highlights the commendable efforts made by app developers to mitigate these risks but points out that determined attackers can still approximate a user's location.

The takeway from this research is that users need to be cautious about the permissions they grant to applications, particularly regarding geolocation services, as these can act as a bane to their privacy and security.