VoteGeo: An IoT-based Voting Approach to Verify the Geographic Location of Cloud Hosts

We propose VoteGeo, an IoT-based voting approach, to verify the geographic location of the cloud hosts in moderately connected networks, where the correlation between the network delay and the distance is weak. We motive our work by showing that: 1) existing solutions, based on end-to-end delay measurement from a group of landmarks with known locations, are only workable when the relationship between the delay and the distance is strong, and 2) such landmark-based schemes are limited by landmark distribution and deployment costs. In our scheme, to enhance the verification accuracy, we develop a vote-based closest-shortest approach to determine the location of the target cloud host, which utilizes the adjacent landmarks with the shortest delays. In order to reduce deployment costs, we adopt random IoT devices (i.e., IP cameras) as landmarks, which are widely distributed and considerable. To reduce the measurement cost, we design a two-level probing method to determine the geographic location of the target cloud hosts step by step, eventually to the city-level. We introduce a delay threshold method, which does not rely on the IP address of the target cloud hosts, to defend against the middlebox-bypass attacks and the delay attacks (i.e., delay-shortening attacks and delay-adding attacks). The evaluation results show that VoteGeo outperforms existing schemes such as GeoGet [1] and CBG [2].