Location Proof Systems for Smart Internet of Things: Requirements, Taxonomy, and Comparative Analysis

Location Proof Systems for Smart Internet of Things: Requirements, Taxonomy, and Comparative Analysis

Survey

Zafar, Faheem et al. “Location Proof Systems for Smart Internet of Things: Requirements, Taxonomy, and Comparative Analysis.” Electronics 9 (2020): 1776.

Location Proof Systems (LPS) evolve over the years and have been implemented in various applications and use cases. This survey reviewed most of the recent literature on LPS, the needs, design, implementation challenges, and important requirements. A taxonomy is presented to show the progress of LPS over the years along with comparative analysis to evaluate some their technical aspects, trust evaluation methods and performance criteria. The taxonomy is created based on nature, deployment approach, localization techniques, lifespan, scope, and location privacy aspects of LPS.

Achieving trustable proof of the physical user presence at a location using smart devices can play a vital role in combating location spoofing attacks. This becomes more apparent with the introduction of incentive Location-Based Services (LBS), such as Foursquare and location-based games and reward apps that rely on valid and trusted user geolocation to enable services and rewards for smart device users.

As mentioned in a previous post in this series, there are various kinds of applications and use cases that require proof of location for single location, travel path location history or even location activity summaries of the users. The design basis of LPS initially started with centralized architecture. However, it suffers from scalability and dependency on trusted third party and that has led to the use of distributed, multi-party witness-oriented models. Nevertheless, cheating or colluding with other participants to generate LP still exists and current solutions are exploring Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to and address the security, privacy and collusion issues in these models.

The main challenges for reliable, secure, and efficient LPS can be seen on their ability to provide the following features:

1. short proof generation time.
2. tamper-proof storage for the generated proofs.
3. minimum or small proof size.
4. trade-off between number of entities involved and proof generation time. More entities gives relaibility at the cost of longer proof generation time.
5. resistance against entities collusions.
6. security features such as integrity, non-transferability of location proofs, and location privacy.