I Am Alice‚ I Was in Wonderland: Secure Location Proof Generation and Verification Protocol

Abstract

In recent years, the proliferation of wireless devices has contributed to the emergence of new set of applications termed as Location Based Services (LBS). LBS provide privileges to mobile users based on their proximity to a facility. In order to gain benefits, users may lie or falsely claim their location. Hence, it is essential to verify the legitimacy of users. In this paper, we propose our novel solution for generating location proof for mobile users and verification of the location claim by application services. Our protocol exploits unique Wi-Fi signal characteristics and employs an information theoretically secure fuzzy vault scheme. We provide a detailed theoretical and experimental evaluation of our protocol. Our solution is faster by an order of magnitude, and the performance of our scheme is independent of the location tag size and distance between the mobile user and location proof provider compared to the state-of-the-art. Index Terms—Location proof, Location based services (LBS), Wireless channel characteristics, Fuzzy vault.