A Cheat-proof System To Validate GPS Location Data

Location-based services are widely used today. The huge growth of location-based services is enabled by GPS capable mobile devices. Moreover, these devices can sense several types of signals over the air using different radio frequency technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular signals, etc.). They receive broadcast messages from transmitting entities (e.g., network access points, cellular phone towers). Broadcast messages carry the information needed in case a mobile device chooses to establish communication. We believe that these signals can be utilized to validate GPS data, which, in many cases, can be tampered with. In this paper, we propose a cheat-proof system to validate reported GPS data and find if this data is authentic or tampered with. This is done by utilizing time-sensitive tamper-proof location validation data broadcasted by Wi-Fi access points in the infrastructure. Then, we present an experiment to test the proposed system.