JoWUA

Abstract

The Global Positioning System (GPS) plays an important role in many industries nowadays. It provides a simple and convenient way for users to locate their position on the Earth. Since the radio wave signal from the GPS Satellite propagates through space and air, it can be easily altered by location spoofing attack (LSA), which is a signal interference on legitimate GPS signal in order to transmit inaccurate GPS coordinates to the target. In recent years, the term ’location spoofing’ can also refer to the act of false reporting on one’s GPS location to other location-based applications. Not many research works have been proposed against the latter problem and none of them provide a good solution on detecting location spoofing within local areas. In this paper, we clarify and differentiate between these two kinds of location spoofing attacks to avoid ambiguity in future research work. We proposed a behavioral detection method making use of the gyroscope and accelerometer commonly equipped in most mobile devices. We verify the genuineness of the GPS data by comparing the travel direction with the facing direction deduced from the orientation data provided by the gyroscope. We further examine the GPS data with the step count provided by the accelerometer to see whether the step length of the travel aligns with the average adult step length. Experiment results show that our proposed methodology can efficiently differentiate between normal and spoofing travels with large deviation on travel direction and step length. We also show that our method is simple to implement in practical situations.