All in one: Improving GPS accuracy and security via crowdsourcing

Abstract

GPS is an integral part of billions of devices that serve a wide range of applications. This reliance upon GPS renders the users vulnerable to GPS spoofing attacks, especially when in need of precise or real-time location information. To protect commodity devices, we first propose a crowdsourcing-based method for detecting GPS spoofing. In this method, called method I, we leverage the orientation diversity of different users to expose spoofing attacks and, in many cases, the location of the attacker. In all scenarios, our method not only recovers the correct location but also significantly improves the location accuracy. This is an important incentive that can drive the adoption of our approach along with the use of privacy-preserving location sharing. Additionally, we leverage the users’ distances produced by GPS and Bluetooth measurements to detect discrepancies and account for errors, called Method II. Method II is robust even in the presence of multiple coordinate adversaries. The experimental results based on our prototype implementation and large-scale simulations demonstrate a detection rate as high as 98.72 % and latency of 62 ms with average localization error of 2.43 m.