‘Who, When, and Where?’ Location Proof Assertion for Mobile Devices

Abstract

In recent years, location of mobile devices has become an important factor. Mobile device users can easily access various customized applications from the service providers based on the current physical location information. Nonetheless, it is a significant challenge in distributed architectures for users to prove their presence at a particular location in a privacy-protected and secured manner. So far, researchers have proposed multiple schemes to implement a secure location proof collection mechanism. However, such location proof schemes are subject to tampering and not resistant to collusion attacks. Additionally, the location authority providing a location proof is assumed to be honest at all times. In this paper, we present the fundamental requirements of any location proof generation scheme, and illustrate the potential attacks possible in such non-federated environments. Based on our observations, we introduce a concept of witness oriented endorsements, and describe a collusion-resistant protocol for asserted location proofs. We provide an exhaustive security analysis of the proposed architecture, based on all possible collusion models among the user, location authority, and witness. We also present a prototype implementation and extensive experimental results to adjust different threshold values and illustrate the feasibility of deploying the protocol in regular devices for practical use.

Location Proof Systems for Smart Internet of Things: Requirements, Taxonomy, and Comparative Analysis

“…The same authors extended the work in [41] to propose the WORAL [22], a distributed witness-oriented secure location provenance framework for mobile devices. WORAL is a complete working system built by integrating the asserted location proof (ALP) of [18] and the OTIT [45] model for managing secure provenance. In WORAL, collusion models and corresponding threats are well discussed, and it is claimed that the system is only 12.5% vulnerable due to 3-way collusion.…”

“…Localization is a mechanism by which smart devices can report their location by computing their position relative to a cellular tower, satellite or other co-located devices. In location proof systems, localization is conducted utilizing physical hardware devices (including infrared [14], Wi-Fi infrastructure [15], Bluetooth [16] and GPS [17]) and algorithms (for example cellular tower triangulation, mobile device triangulation [18], audio-based positioning [14], IP address tracking [18], distance bounding protocols [19] and proximity [13,20]) in a secure manner. From a design perspective, centralized architectures were used initially to provide the basis for location proof systems.…”

“…Nature: Location proof systems can be reactive or proactive [15,18,22,32]. Reactive proofs are application dependent, requiring dedicated hardware, and they cannot be re-used for other applications.…”

“…Scope: Location proof systems can support single location proof [4,15,16,18,41] activity summaries, distance covered, or travel history established by recording the chronological order of single location proofs in a chain [22,23,45]. Activity summaries [2,54] represent the user's physical activity, such as jogging on a track covering a certain distance.…”

Detecting Location Fraud in Indoor Mobile Crowdsensing

“…QR code forgery a ack has been reported in our previous work [23]. In order to provide veri cations for users' location claims, location proof mechanisms have been proposed [7,20]. However, these methods require either additional infrastructures or lots of users which will complicate the design of a mobile crowdsensing system.…”