Secure Location Verification Using Simultaneous Multilateration

Substantial effort has been invested on secure location verification in hope to enable mobile wireless systems to optimize system performance or securely confer rights based on the participants' locations. However, most previous studies do not address the impact of, and are often susceptible to, collusion attacks in which adversaries share their private keys. In this paper, we propose a secure multilateration scheme. Given the same processing delay, detection threshold, and assuming zero synchronization error between verifiers, our proposed scheme achieves the highest rate of false-location detection by any verification system based solely on time-of-flight measurements. We also show that our scheme is resilient to collusion attacks if the verification system can detect the distance enlargement attack. We propose using other physical measurements to mitigate the distance enlargement, and thus also the collusion, attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to prevent collusion attacks by mitigating the distance enlargement attack.