skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Secure indoor positioning against signal strength attacks via optimized multi-voting
Indoor positioning systems (IPSes) can enable many location-based services in large indoor venues where GPS signals are unavailable or unreliable. Among the most viable types of IPSes, RSS-IPSes rely on ubiquitous smartphones and indoor WiFi infrastructures and explore distinguishable received signal strength (RSS) measurements at different indoor locations as their location fingerprints. RSS-IPSes are unfortunately vulnerable to physical-layer RSS attacks that cannot be thwarted by conventional cryptographic techniques. Existing defenses against RSS attacks are all subject to an inherent tradeoff between indoor positioning accuracy and attack resilience. This paper presents the design and evaluation of MV-IPS, a novel RSS-IPS based on weighted multi-voting, which does not suffer from this tradeoff. In MV-IPS, every WiFi access point (AP) that receives a user’s RSS measurement gives a weighted vote for every reference location, and the reference location that receives the highest accumulative votes from all APs is output as the user’s most likely position. Trace-driven simulation studies based on real RSS measurements demonstrate that MV-IPS can achieve much higher positioning accuracy than prior solutions no matter whether RSS attacks are present.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1651954 1718078 1700039
PAR ID:
10172908
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 10
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Indoor navigation is necessary for users to explore large unfamiliar indoor environments such as airports, shopping malls, and hospital complex, which relies on the capability of continuously tracking a user's location. A typical indoor navigation system is built on top of a suitable Indoor Positioning System (IPS) and requires the user to periodically submit location queries to learn their whereabouts whereby to provide update-to-date navigation information. Received signal strength (RSS)-based IPSes are considered as one of the most classical IPSes, which locates a user by comparing the user's RSS measurement with the fingerprints collected at different locations in advance. Despite its significant advantages, existing RSS-IPSes suffer from two key challenges, the ambiguity of RSS fingerprints and device diversity, that may greatly reduce its positioning accuracy. In this paper, we introduce the design and evaluation of CITS, a novel RSS-based continuous indoor tracking system that can effectively cope with fingerprint ambiguity and device diversity via differential RSS fingerprint matching. Detailed experiment studies confirm the significant advantages of CITS over prior RSS-based solutions. 
    more » « less
  2. Dead reckoning is a promising yet often overlooked smartphone-based indoor localization technology that relies on phone-mounted sensors for counting steps and estimating walking directions, without the need for extensive sensor or landmark deployment. However, misalignment between the phone’s direction and the user’s actual movement direction can lead to unreliable direction estimates and inaccurate location tracking. To address this issue, this paper introduces SWiLoc (Smartphone and WiFi-based Localization), an enhanced direction correction system that integrates passive WiFi sensing with smartphone-based sensing to form Correction Zones. Our two-phase approach accurately measures the user’s walking directions when passing through a Correction Zone and further refines successive direction estimates outside the zones, enabling continuous and reliable tracking. In addition to direction correction, SWiLoc extends its capabilities by incorporating a localization technique that leverages corrected directions to achieve precise user localization. This extension significantly enhances the system’s applicability for high-accuracy localization tasks. Additionally, our innovative Fresnel zone-based approach, which utilizes unique hardware configurations and a fundamental geometric model, ensures accurate and robust direction estimation, even in scenarios with unreliable walking directions. We evaluate SWiLoc across two real-world environments, assessing its performance under varying conditions such as environmental changes, phone orientations, walking directions, and distances. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SWiLoc achieves an average 75th percentile error of 8.89 degrees in walking direction estimation and an 80th percentile error of 1.12 m in location estimation. These figures represent reductions of 64% and 49%, respectively for direction and location estimation error, over existing state-of-the-art approaches. 
    more » « less
  3. There are a wide variety of mobile phone emergency response applications exist for both indoor and outdoor environments. However, outdoor applications mostly provide accident and navigation information to users, and indoor applications are limited to the unavailability of GPS positioning and WiFi access problems. This paper describes the proposed mobile augmented reality system (MARS) that allows both outdoor and indoor users to retrieve and manage information for emergency response and navigation that is spatially registered with the real world. The proposed MARS utilizes feature extraction for location sensing in indoor environments as during emergencies GPS and WiFi systems might not work. This paper describes the implementation of this MARS deployed on tablets and smartphones for building evacuation purposes. The MARS delivers critical evacuation information to smartphone users in the indoor environment and navigation information in the outdoor environments. A limited user study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed MARS using the mobile phone usability questionnaire (MPUQ) framework. The results show that AR features were well integrated into the MARS and it will help identify the nearest exit in the building during the emergency evacuation. 
    more » « less
  4. Indoor location services often use Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices for their low energy consumption and easy implementation. Applications like device monitoring, ranging, and asset tracking utilize the received signal strength (RSS) of the BLE signal to estimate the proximity of a device from the receiver. However, in multipath environments, RSS-based solutions may not provide an accurate estimation. In such environments, receivers with antenna arrays are used to calculate the difference in time of flight (ToF) and therefore calculate the direction of arrival (DoA) of the Bluetooth signal. Other techniques like triangulation have also been used, such as having multiple transmitters or receivers as a network of sensors. To find a lost item, devices like Tile© use an onboard beeper to notify users of their presence. In this paper, we present a system that uses a single-measurement device and describe the method of measurement to estimate the location of a BLE device using RSS. A BLE device is configured as an Eddystone beacon for periodic transmission of advertising packets with RSS information. We developed a smartphone application to read RSS information from the beacon, designed an algorithm to estimate the DoA, and used the phone’s internal sensors to evaluate the DoA with respect to true north. The proposed measurement method allows for asset tracking by iterative measurements that provide the direction of the beacon and take the user closer at every step. The receiver application is easily deployable on a smartphone, and the algorithm provides direction of the beacon within a 30° range, as suggested by the provided results. 
    more » « less
  5. WiFi received signal strength (RSS) environment evolves over time due to the movement of access points (APs), AP power adjustment, installation and removal of APs, etc. We study how to effectively update an existing database of fingerprints, defined as the RSS values of APs at designated locations, using a batch of newly collected unlabelled (possibly crowdsourced) WiFi signals. Prior art either estimates the locations of the new signals without updating the existing fingerprints or filters out the new APs without sufficiently embracing their features. To address that, we propose GUFU, a novel effective graph-based approach to update WiFi fingerprints using unlabelled signals with possibly new APs. Based on the observation that similar signal vectors likely imply physical proximity, GUFU employs a graph neural network (GNN) and a link prediction algorithm to retrain an incremental network given the new signals and APs. After the retraining, it then updates the signal vectors at the designated locations. Through extensive experiments in four large representative sites, GUFU is shown to achieve remarkably higher fingerprint adaptivity as compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, with error reduction of 21.4% and 29.8% in RSS values and location prediction, respectively. 
    more » « less