Spoofing attacks and countermeasures in fm indoor localization system

Abstract

FM-based indoor localization identifies the location of an user by looking at the received signal strength (RSS) at the user’s location. In this paper, we discover a spoofing attack which is able to cause the FM-based indoor localization system to malfunction. The newly discovered, easy launched spoofing attack which enables the adversary to deceive a victim user to obtain a fake indoor location through remotely manipulating the RSS at the user’s location simultaneously. By analyzing the features of the received and FM signals in the frequency domain, we propose a defense method to deal with this attack. The proposed method contains two levels of detections. Specifically, the first level of detection distinguishes between the normal signal and the attack/noise signal, and the second level of detection finally detects the existence of the attack signal. We perform real-world experiments on Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs) to spoof a target location to four different locations 6 - 32 meters away from the target location. The experiment results show a promising performance of the proposed defense method with a false negative rate and a false alarm rate of 3.9% and 6.4%, respectively.