Ranging and Location attacks on 802.11 FTM

International audience802.11 Fine Timing Measurement is an indoor ranging technique. Because it is unauthenticated and unprotected, our experiments indicate that an adversary can implement ranging and location attacks, causing an unsuspecting client to incorporate forged values into its location computation. FTM clients tend to range against a small set of responders (top 3 to 6 responders with strongest signal). Once ranges have been collected, the client can compute its location using various techniques, such as 3-sphere intersection, matrix error minimization techniques or Kalman filter. Irrespective of the technique, we show in this paper that an attacker can cause a ranging client to deviate from its intended path, which can have dire consequences in some settings (e.g., automatic shuttle in public venue causing damages). We also show that protection intended for attacks on comparable ranging techniques, like GPS, are ineffective in the case of FTM