Detection on GPS Spoofing in Location Based Mobile Games

Abstract

The widely used Global Positioning System (GPS) provides a handy way for electronic devices to locate their positions. Almost every mobile device nowadays has GPS module equipped inside. Apart from traditional location service applications, more and more eccentric applications are developed to utilize this functionality. Location based mobile games such as Pokémon GO are one of the examples which make use of location service to give players innovative experience. However, this kind of location based mobile games are vulnerable to Location Spoofing Attack (LSA), which malicious users can navigate freely in game using location spoofing applications without travelling themselves physically. Various approaches are being proposed to tackle this problem while none of them give good performance in detecting spoofing in local area. In this paper, we proposed a detection method on GPS spoofing in local area by making use of the gyroscope commonly equipped in most mobile devices. We compare the travelling direction of the GPS travelling path with the facing direction of the mobile device to check if they match well with each other. Experiment result shows that our method can efficiently differentiate between location spoofing behavior and normal behavior with easy implementation.