On the impact of localization data in wireless sensor networks with malicious nodes

The knowledge of node positions is a core concept in any Wireless Sensor Network context. Several localization algorithms were devised, but secure localization of sensor nodes is still a challenging task to achieve with a high level of performance. In fact, location information might be the target of different kinds of malicious attacks and several secure localization approaches were proposed. In this paper we analyze the impact of false data in a secure localization algorithm, known as Verifiable Multilateration. We found that the strategy used to compute the positions of nodes might have an impact both on the computational effort needed to achieve acceptable measures and the precision of the detection of malicious nodes.