LoCaaS: Location-Certification-as-a-Service

By Lucas Vicente / 08-12-2022 / In categories Results

publication, result

Translations: PT

Paper in a peer-reviewed international conference

LoCaaS: Location-Certification-as-a-Service


Location Spoofing, Location Certificate, Security, Cloud Computing

Authors

Lucas H. Vicente, Samih Eisa, Miguel L. Pardal

Conference

IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA). Online conference. 2022

Resources

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Abstract

Millions of tourists each year use smartphone applications to discover points of interest. Despite relying heavily on location sensing, most of them are susceptible to location spoofing, but not all. CROSS City is a smart tourism application that rewards users for completing tourist itineraries and uses location certificates to prevent attacks. In this case, the location verification relies on the periodic collection of public Wi-Fi network observations by multiple users to make sure the travelers actually went to the points of interest.

In this paper, we introduce the Location-Certification-as-a-Service (LoCaaS) approach, supported by a cloud-native and improved location certification system, capable of producing and validating time-bound location proofs using network data collected by tourists’ mobile devices. We show that the system can efficiently compute the stable and transient networks for a given location that are used, respectively, to validate the location of a tourist and to prove the time-of-visit. The system was deployed to the Google Cloud Platform and was validated with performance experiments and a real-world deployment.