Toward Secure Localization in Randomly Deployed Wireless Networks

Being able to accurately locate wireless devices, while guaranteeing high-level of security against spoofing attacks, benefits all participants in the localization chain (e.g., end users, network operators, and location service providers). On the one hand, most of existing localization systems are designed for innocuous environments, where no malicious adversaries are present. On the other hand, existing secure localization solutions make certain assumptions regarding the network topology, which restrict their applicability. Therefore, this work addresses the problem of target localization in randomly deployed wireless networks in the presence of a malicious attacker, whose goal is to manipulate (spoof) the estimation process in order to disable accurate localization. This is an important problem since strengthening the security of current non-secure systems or generalization of existing secure localization systems to ad hoc scenarios will enable additional reliable safety parameter (location) to be employed for digital interactions in more general contexts (such as social media, health monitoring or surveillance systems). We propose a low-complex solution based on clustering and weighted central mass to detect the attacker, using only the bare minimum of reference points, after which we solve the localization problem by a bisection procedure. The proposed method is studied from both localization accuracy and success in attacker detection point of views, where closed-form expressions for upper and lower bounds on the probability of attacker detection are derived. Its performance is validated through computer simulations, which corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, outperforming the state-of-the-art method.