Peers-Based Location of Mobile Devices

Abstract

As the smart mobile device popularity is rapidly growing, numerous location-based services try to aid us in daily tasks, offering new patterns of consumerism and personal productivity. The wide range of location oriented services also increase the risk of services being abused by receiving fabricated location of the mobile device. Particularly, modern threats such as mobile viruses, botnets and malicious applications can spoof subscriber location for fun and profit. In this paper we suggest a technique which allows a service to verify a client’s location based on confirmation from devices located nearby. Using this scheme makes it significantly harder to trick the service into accepting a spoofed location. Practically, this technique may introduce a new set of services which can rely on the reported location in high confidence. We show that with the continuous trends of prevalent Wi-Fi capable devices in modern environment, this scheme becomes practical, and discuss design considerations and implementation issues.