Localization Threats in Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

The impact of localization systems in our daily lives is increasing. As next-generation networks will introduce hyperconnectivity with the emerging applications, this impact will undoubtedly further increase, proliferating the importance of the location information's reliability. As society becomes more dependent on this information in terms of the products and services, security solutions will have to be enriched to provide countermeasures sufficiently advanced to ever-evolving threats, forcing the joint design of communication and localization systems. This paper envisions integrated communication and localization systems by focusing on localization security. Also, conventional and next-generation attacks on localization are discussed along with an efficient attack detection method and test-bed-based demonstration, highlighting the need for effective countermeasures. I. INTRODUCTIONThe progress in user companion devices equipped with rich communication capabilities and advanced computational intelligence forces wireless networks to enable the emerging computation-hungry and delay-sensitive services. These trends, in addition to revealing more stringent communication requirements in terms of rate-reliability-latency, also trigger precise and highly accurate secure localization systems. From the product and services perspectives, the research path towards 6G dauntingly forces the design of integrated wireless communication and localization systems (ICLS), as visualized in Fig. 1.The research community has been working on localization systems with a mission-critical part of various civilian and military applications for decades. Current well-established solutions include GNSS-based localization for outdoors and WiFi/Bluetooth-based localization for indoors. These solutions provide a limited accuracy, depending on the environment and products 3-10 meters (m) resolution for GNSS and 0.3-2.5 m for WiFi/Bluetooth [1], [2]. Nevertheless, localization remains an active research area regarding the achieved performances and the practical implementations, particularly in the emerging