What is it about?
This paper is divided in two parts. The first part is the story of a failure, where an attempt to generate verifiable Proof-of-Location from WiFi scan results has failed, even when scan results were compared with a small time shift within the same trace. In the second part, this paper proposes to conduct Proof-of-Location transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion. Each peer is assisted by the cloud side which plays the role of both the real-time mediator and public transaction ledger. This paper proposes the Last Man Standing (LMS) procedure which is both a means for ensuring a fair transaction and a natural way to close it. Each transaction results in a coin which can be either shared among transaction participants or owned individually by LMS. Analysis using real mobility traces from various types of urban locations shows that the proposal is valid and will ensure that all the locations within the city will gradually be claimed via the proposed type of transactions while providing independently verifiable proofs for each location. The distant goal of this paper is a next generation Location-Based Service (LBS) which takes the form of a location-based resource economy where each location is a coin compatible with traditional blockchain operations.
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Why is it important?
There is a market for secure and publicly verifiable Location Based Services (LBS). For example, a service can say "I can be accessed HERE" or "HERE is where one can find me", that "here", in today's realities, can be easily spoofed. Now, if one publicizes (preferably numerous) public verifications of "here" in via the blockchain or, even better, a block-graph, one arrives as a much higher level of security. With a little effort, public verification can be anonymized to protect identity of participants.
Perspectives
There is one huge future goal for this research which incidentally also solves an urgent existing problem. When coupled with a lifelog-like element, personal daily lives can be encoded as LBS traces, which would allow to quickly detect anomalous (as in malicious) activity. In plain words and through a simple example, this could be the end of credit card theft (old) and attacks on cashless payment systems (new). With such augmented security, one can envision that people would strive to imprint their mobility patterns for their own safety. Besides the automation (subways, routine cashless payments, etc.), how about "I was here" digital poles in dense urban areas?
Marat Zhanikeev
Tokyo University of Science
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Last Man Standing Technique for Proof-of-Location in IoT Infrastructures at Network Edge, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, June 2019, Hindawi Publishing Corporation,
DOI: 10.1155/2019/7317019.
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