Secure probabilistic location verification in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks

Security plays an important role in the ability to deploy and retrieve trustworthy data from a wireless sensor network. Location verification is an effective defense against attacks which take advantage of a lack, or compromise, of location information. In this work, a secure probabilistic location verification method for randomly deployed dense sensor networks is proposed. The proposed Probabilistic Location Verification (PLV) algorithm leverages the probabilistic dependence of the number of hops a broadcast packet traverses to reach a destination and the Euclidean distance between the source and the destination. A small number of verifier nodes are used to determine the plausibility of the claimed location, which is represented by a real number between zero and one. Using the calculated plausibility metric, it is possible to create arbitrary number of trust levels in the location claimed. Simulation studies verify that the proposed solution provides high performance in face of various types of attacks.