Coordinated Position Falsification Attacks and Countermeasures for Location-Based Services

2025-10-31

AI Summary

Location-based services (LBS) are vulnerable to low-cost attacks—including Wi-Fi spoofing and GNSS jamming—as well as coordinated position-spoofing threats. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework based on redundant multi-source localization fusion. Our approach innovatively extends the Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) paradigm by integrating heterogeneous signals—namely GNSS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, IP geolocation databases, and in-vehicle sensors—into a cross-modal integrity verification mechanism. Crucially, it requires no additional hardware, leveraging only existing platform sensing capabilities. This design significantly enhances robustness against sophisticated spoofing attacks and improves trustworthy position recovery accuracy. Experimental evaluation demonstrates up to a 62% improvement in attack detection accuracy over baseline methods, alongside effective reconstruction of verifiable positions. The solution offers a lightweight, deployable integrity assurance mechanism for real-world LBS systems.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

With the rise of location-based service (LBS) applications that rely on terrestrial and satellite infrastructures (e.g., GNSS and crowd-sourced Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and IP databases) for positioning, ensuring their integrity and security is paramount. However, we demonstrate that these applications are susceptible to low-cost attacks (less than $50), including Wi-Fi spoofing combined with GNSS jamming, as well as more sophisticated coordinated location spoofing. These attacks manipulate position data to control or undermine LBS functionality, leading to user scams or service manipulation. Therefore, we propose a countermeasure to detect and thwart such attacks by utilizing readily available, redundant positioning information from off-the-shelf platforms. Our method extends the receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) framework by incorporating opportunistic information, including data from onboard sensors and terrestrial infrastructure signals, and, naturally, GNSS. We theoretically show that the fusion of heterogeneous signals improves resilience against sophisticated adversaries on multiple fronts. Experimental evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving detection accuracy by 62% at most compared to baseline schemes and restoring accurate positioning.

Problem

• Detecting coordinated location spoofing attacks on LBS
• Countering low-cost attacks manipulating position data
• Improving resilience against adversarial positioning manipulation

Innovation

• Extends RAIM framework with opportunistic sensor data
• Fuses heterogeneous signals for improved attack resilience
• Uses redundant positioning to detect location spoofing attacks