Global attestation of location in mobile devices

Abstract

Location information in mobile devices are very important part of any location based transactions. The information can be faked and can be misrepresented for meeting specific requirements. A number of mechanisms have been used to ensure that the location information provided by the mobile device is accurate. In this paper, we introduce the notion of gathering evidences independently where each entity reports contacts with other entities in specific locations at specific times. Some of the reports may be not true and in order to scrutinize these, we introduce the global consistency check. This is mainly based on the model similar to the block chain model in Bitcoin. With a global consistency check we can ensure if a particular entity is being dishonest about the location information. We have used the EigenTrust and PeerTrust check methodologies to calculate global and personalised trust matrix while confirming attestation. The paper also shows the importance of global attestation scheme over local attestation.