Reliable Detection of Location Spoofing and Variation Attacks

Location spoofing is a critical attack in mobile communications. While several previous studies investigated the detection of location spoofing attacks, they are limited in their performance and lack the consideration of emerging attack variations. In this paper, we present a data-driven methodology for the reliable detection of location spoofing and its variations. To enhance the performance, we introduce and utilize a new set of features, which is differential in nature and enables the checking of the mobility constraints and inconsistency. Our comparison study with the previous research shows that the presented scheme using the new features significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of the detection against location spoofing attacks. To take the possibility of attack variations into account, we establish a set of scenarios manipulating coordinate data to create attack variants. Our experimental results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the new features for identifying diverse types of spoofing attacks and their variations, greatly improving the detection performance by up to 99.1% accuracy. Additionally, we present a profiling-based detection approach (building the detector referring only to legitimate coordinate data), to further extend resilience to previously unseen attacks as a means to zero-day detection. The evaluation result shows the potential of the profiling-based detector with comparable or even better performance than the supervised learning methods (requiring both legitimate and falsified data to construct the detector).