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Secure localization and location verification in wireless sensor networks: a survey

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Abstract

The locations of sensor nodes are very important to many wireless sensor networks (WSNs). When WSNs are deployed in hostile environments, two issues about sensors’ locations need to be considered. First, attackers may attack the localization process to make estimated locations incorrect. Second, since sensor nodes may be compromised, the base station (BS) may not trust the locations reported by sensor nodes. Researchers have proposed two techniques, secure localization and location verification, to solve these two issues, respectively. In this paper, we present a survey of current work on both secure localization and location verification. We first describe the attacks against localization and location verification, and then we classify and describe existing solutions. We also implement typical secure localization algorithms of one popular category and study their performance by simulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, P.R. China

    Yingpei Zeng, Jue Hong & Li Xie

  2. Department of Computer Science, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, P.R. China

    Shigeng Zhang

  3. Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, P.R. China

    Jiannong Cao

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  1. Yingpei Zeng
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  2. Jiannong Cao
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  3. Jue Hong
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  4. Shigeng Zhang
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  5. Li Xie
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Correspondence to Yingpei Zeng.

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Zeng, Y., Cao, J., Hong, J. et al. Secure localization and location verification in wireless sensor networks: a survey. J Supercomput 64, 685–701 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0501-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0501-4

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