Wormhole defense for cooperative trajectory mapping

Cooperative trajectory mapping is an emerging technique that allows users to collaboratively map a person’s movements without using GPS measurements in indoor scenarios. This is accomplished by letting users periodically transmit limited amount of information, collected from their mobile phones, to a central server for processing. Cooperative mapping solutions have been proposed for applications ranging from people localization to traffic monitoring. In this paper, we consider the problem of fake trail attacks in cooperative trajectory mapping. In a fake trail attack, the adversary seeks to create a fraudulent shorter path between two locations. The unique characteristics of cooperative mapping make conventional wormhole defenses, such as packet leashes, unsuitable. We propose an efficient algorithm which can successfully deter an adversary from launching such an attack, and we validate the effectiveness of our solution through extensive simulation experiments.