Exploiting European GNSS and Ethereum in location proof systems

Abstract

Location-Based Services (LBSs) are essential in many application contexts like ride-sharing or navigation apps. There are cases where users could gain an advantage by submitting fake locations. The problem faced in this paper concerns the possibility that the geographic location declared by a user is not the actual location in which the user is placed. Some solutions are based on centralized or distributed verification in the literature, and other solutions are based on witnesses or infrastructure. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of such approaches and propose a new scheme that exploits signals coming from satellites to provide trustworthy location proofs, also respecting users' privacy. The proposed approach is decentralized because location proofs are stored by users in a suitably-encrypted way, and a blockchain is adopted to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. We show that the proposed approach overcomes the state of the art through a detailed analysis.