176-179 Towards a stronger location integrity

Abstract

Currently in mobile location-based services the application relies solely on the coordinates provided by the phone's operating system to determine its location. The application residing on the phone then submits the resulting location data to the application server, leaving the protocol insecure as a dishonest user can inject fake data at the last step. In this paper we propose a new method that allows an application to independently verify the integrity of submitted data by checking its plausibility given surrounding Wifi access points. Instead of the traditional single channel of information, namely the submitted coordinates, the application can supplement a second channel to potentially filter out fraudulent location data. © Springer-Verlag 2013.