SVNM: Secure verification of neighborhood membership in static multi-hop wireless networks

Secure verification of neighborhood membership (SVNM) is a relatively recently stated problem that has an increasing number of practical applications. The problem can be stated as the capability of a wireless network node (verifier) to verify the claim by another node (claimer) that it exists within a certain physical distance from the verifier. Several physical properties of the received signal are used for onehop location estimation - signal strength, time of flight, and angle of arrival, etc. However, many of these approaches are either not practically applicable or prohibitively expensive in many wireless network scenarios. In this work, we propose algorithms to detect and isolate nodes that lie about their location in the incremental addition phase of static sensor networks. Every node should announce its position and the power level it uses for transmission. Cooperative and base station verifications are used to detect nodes that lie about their locations. Our results show that we can achieve perfect detection (100%) of nodes that falsify their location information using either high power transmission or with the help of other nodes.