Path-Stamps: A Proposal for Enhancing Security of Location Tracking Applications

Location tracking technologies are penetrating increasingly in industrial environments. Several challenges arise when people or mobile assets are tracked. Security is one of the main problems that location tracking poses. In this position paper we want to address the long-term authentication and accountability of location tracking history information or path. In order to accomplish this, we generalize the existent definition of location-stamp, then we formulate the new concept of path-stamp and, finally, we present a path-stamping architecture and protocol. We define a path-stamp as the evidence that, by itself or used with other information, allows a third party to prove that an entity has moved along some certain path enforcing a determined path-stamping policy. Our proposed solution is built on location-stamps, relative temporal authentication using linking schemes, and path-stamp entanglement.