A low-cost UAV-based secure location verification method

The capability to verify positions reported by devices is called secure location verification. The majority of the proposed solutions entail the use of many fixed anchors often along with special hardware, e.g., ultra-wideband and ultrasonic transceivers. However, the deployment and maintenance costs of such solutions make them scarcely attractive. A cheaper alternative is to use mobile entities as trusted infrastructure. In particular, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent a promising approach. Indeed, recent studies used them to face the secure location verification problem. In this paper, we introduce a low-cost approach based on a swarm of UAVs and a common radio frequency protocol, e.g., WiFi. By experimental simulations, we show that by using only three UAVs our system detects more than 99% of the attacks against an adversary that falsifies its position of at least 20 m. We also consider an adversary capable of tracking UAVs posi-tions. The success probability of such an advanced adversary is smaller than 1% starting from a falsification distance larger than 35 m.