Secure localization with phantom node detection

In an adversarial environment, various kinds of attacks become possible if malicious nodes could claim fake locations that are different from their physical locations. In this paper, we propose a secure localization mechanism that detects existence of these nodes, termed as phantom nodes, without relying on any trusted entities, an approach significantly different from the existing ones. The proposed mechanism enjoys a set of nice features. First, it does not have any central point of attack. All nodes play the role of verifier, by generating local map, i.e. a view constructed based on ranging information from its neighbors. Second, this distributed and localized construction results in strong robustness against adversaries: even when the number of phantom nodes is greater than that of honest nodes, we can filter out most of the phantom nodes. Our analytical results as well as simulations under realistic noisy settings demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is effective in the presence of a large number of phantom nodes.