MobChain: Three-Way Collusion Resistance in Witness-Oriented Location Proof Systems Using Distributed Consensus

Smart devices have accentuated the importance of geolocation information. Geolocation identification using smart devices has paved the path for incentive-based location-based services (LBS). A location proof is a digital certificate of the geographical location of a user, which can be used to access various LBS. However, a user full control over a device allows the tampering of location proof. Initially, to resist false proofs, two-party trusted centralized location proof systems (LPS) were introduced to aid the users in generating secure location proofs mutually. However, two-party protocols suffered from the collusion attacks by the participants of the protocol. Consequently, many witness-oriented LPS have emerged to mitigate collusion attacks in two-party protocols. However, witness-oriented LPS presented the possibility of three-way collusion attacks (involving the user, location authority, and the witness). The three-way collusion attacks are inevitable in all existing witness-oriented schemes. To mitigate the inability to resist three-way collusion of existing schemes, in this paper, we introduce a decentralized consensus protocol called as MobChain, where the selection of a witness and location authority is achieved through a distributed consensus of nodes in an underlying P2P network of a private blockchain. The persistent provenance data over the blockchain provides strong security guarantees, as a result, the forging and manipulation become impractical. MobChain provides secure location provenance architecture, relying on decentralized decision making for the selection of participants of the protocol to resist three-way collusion problem. Our prototype implementation and comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions show that MobChain is computationally efficient, highly available while improving the security of LPS.

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