WiLoVe: A WiFi-coverage based Location Verification System in LBS

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile devices, location-based services (LBS) have penetrated into our daily life in recent years. In an LBS system, the users check in at different venues to acquire rewards such as virtual points or real-world coupons/discounts, and easily share with their friends the recent activities. While these rewards benefit benign users a lot, they are incentives for malicious users to cheat on their locations. Recent researches have revealed that location cheating can be launched automatically on a large scale at ease. In current practice, the defense against location cheating relies on the server side solution, which has been proven to be insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel verification system named WiLoVe. It maps the physical area of a venue to the local WiFi coverage and involves the venue owner as the verifier, hence utilizes the user's capability of one-hop communication with the verifier to verify the user's presence at the venue. In this work, we implement the verifier as an independent application, which can easily be installed on the venue owner's existing devices (laptops, cellphones, etc.). Hence, no additional hardware is needed. An adaptive algorithm is designed to defend against proxy attacks based on the check-in delay. Extensive experiments show that WiLoVe achieves low false rate, as well as consistent user experience, acceptable power consumption, and good applicability to different WiFi environments.