Optimal Information-Theoretic Wireless Location Verification

Given the growing, and often critical, use of location information in emerging mobile applications, the development of an optimal Location Verification System (LVS) is of increasing importance. This is especially so for network-based Intelligent Transport Systems, where verification of location information is paramount. In this work, for the first time, a rigorous information-theoretic framework for a general LVS is developed in which the LVS's decision rule is optimized in terms of the mutual information between its input and output data. We are specifically interested in the general attack scenario in which a non-colluding malicious user outside the perimeter of a network region (e.g. a highway) optimally boosts his transmit power in an attempt to fool the LVS that he is inside the network region. Developing specific threat models for this attack scenario, we investigate in detail, both analytically and numerically, the performance of the LVS in terms of its input/output mutual information. Our work shows how the LVS's decision rule can be implemented straightforwardly with a performance that delivers near-optimality under realistic threat models, with information-theoretic optimality approached as the malicious user moves further from the network region.