Detecting malicious nodes in RSS-based localization

Measurements of received signal strength (RSS) on wireless links provide position information in various localization systems, including multilateration-based and fingerprint-based positioning systems, and device-free localization systems. Existing localization schemes assume a fixed or known transmit power. Therefore, any variation in transmit power can result in error in location estimate. In this paper, we present a generic framework for detecting power attacks and identifying the source of such transmit power variation. Our results show that we can achieve close to zero missed detections and false alarms with RSS measurements of only 50 transmissions. We also present an analysis of trade-off between accuracy and latency of detection for our method.