A Secure low-cost WLAN Localization Scheme

Localization in WLAN networks has been an active area of research recently. However, most of the previous schemes in this area do not consider the presence of any malicious user within the network. The growing interest in location based services would necessitate the development of a low-cost localization scheme which is robust against the attacks from these malicious users. We have developed such a low-cost secure localization scheme that is based on the current access point (AP) capability of transmitting at different power levels. The main idea here is to leverage this capability of APs so that at every location in the system a unique set of messages transmitted by various APs can be received. The client is expected to transmit back the receiving messages to the AP it is associated with. The location of the client is then estimated using the set of messages received from the client. We intend to present a poster discussing the performance of this scheme along with its inherent security capabilities. The implementation of this message based scheme for a pilot loca-tion based service implementation, controlled by the enterprise policy, over a testbed deployment will also be described. We will also present our preliminary experiments which indicate that this scheme has similar or better performance as compared to the traditional signal strength based localization schemes. We intend to discuss various open issues in this area and obtain valuable feedback on this work at the conference. I