Location Proving with a Single Witness: A hybrid Prover-Witness and TOTP-based Solution
Onur Ciftci, Elif Nurdan Pektaş, Zahra Esfandiari Baiat, Tacha Şerif · 2022 Innovations in Intelligent Systems and Applications Conference (ASYU) · 2022
With the increasing number of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Location-Based Services (LBS) became an important part of our life. These applications provide value added services to users within a specific area or vicinity, which as a result may motivate users to declare counterfeit locations and benefit from them. Accordingly, this study proposes a beacon based Prover-Witness (P-W) technique to create a hardened solution for location proving with increased privacy and security in mind. Hence, the proposed solution incorporates P-W technique with time-based one time password (TOTP) mechanism to perform with only one witness in the environment. A prototype of the proposed solution is implemented and tested in a real-world environment by using one prover and one witness. The findings of the evaluation showed that the prototype managed to improve the security and privacy of the location proving process without increasing the required minimum number of witnesses.