Secure Location Verification with Randomly-Selected Base Stations

In some networks, a mobile node must be located securely as well as accurately. One way to locate is for base stations to use time-difference-of-arrival multilateration. An attacker that can transmit at different times in different directions may falsify its position with respect to known base stations. Previous work proposed hiding the base stations, following a model of "security through obscurity." We propose randomly selecting a set of base stations such that even if their locations are known, the attacker has at most a 50% chance of succeeding in one trial. Through iteration we reduce the likelihood of success to an arbitrarily small probability.