A localization game in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) support data collection and distributed data processing by means of very small sensing devices that are easy to tamper and clone: therefore classical security solutions based on access control and strong authentication are difficult to deploy. In this paper we look at the problem of assessing the reliability of node localization data from a game theoretical viewpoint. In particular, we analyze the scenario in which Verifiable Multilateration (VM) is used to localize nodes and a malicious node (i.e., the adversary) try to masquerade as non-malicious. We resort to non-cooperative game theory and we model this scenario as a two-player game. Thus, we were able to compute an upper bound to the error that an attacker can induce in localization data, given the number of available verifiers. We focused on the maximum deception, that is the distance between the inferred position of an unknown node and the actual one: we found that if the verifiers are placed opportunely, the deception is at most 25% of the power range, and can be halved by triplicating the number of the verifiers.