MSCA-COFUND-CLEAR-Doc - PhD Position #CD22-09: indoor positioning and cybersecurity

Context:

Widespread extension of wireless coverage has enabled the design and development of a number of advanced location-based services. Continuous tracking of accurate physical location is the foundation of these services, which is a challenging mission especially in indoor. Different levels of accuracy are offered by these systems depending on radio technology and on the metric used for the distance estimation.

Accurate real time positioning is the key to enable positioning service. Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS and Galileo, are widely used for localization outdoors, satellites systems do not provide satisfactory performance in indoor environments. Unlike outdoor ones, indoor environments are very complex, due to specific wave propagation conditions, involving both stationary and moving targets, and heavy multipath.

As a result, accuracy, reliability, scalability and adaptability to the environment remain as challenges for widespread deployment of indoor positioning systems. Another challenging aspect that emerged in the last years is the relation between location and security/cybersecurity: location information can be in fact a powerful feature to increase access security, by providing an additional identification layer based on physical position.

Proposition:

In this thesis the objective is to design, implement and evaluate an indoor localization solution based on multiple radio technologies (ranging from Personal Area Network technologies, like UWB and Bluetooth Low Energy, and Wireless Local Area Networks, like WiFi, to cellular network technologies like 4G, 5G and NB-IoT), to be used to both provide accurate positioning information and detect and counteract all spoofing attacks.

Identity spoofing attacks pose one of the most serious threats to communication and positioning radio systems, where the attacker can masquerade as legitimate users by modifying its own identity. Although various channel-based security technologies have been proposed for communication application, the study of spoofing attack detection by indoor positioning is largely open.

The proposed system will take advantage of the combination of multiple wireless technologies, and explore a combination of proximity-based techniques, as typically done in BLE positioning systems, fingerprinting-based positioning techniques, as typically done in WiFi positioning systems, and Time Of Arrival / Time Difference Of Arrival approaches, typically proposed and adopted for positioning in UWB and, more recently, in cellular networks. The system will not only aim at maximizing positioning accuracy, as typically done in the design of indoor positioning systems, but also at minimizing the probability that a spoofer can successfully replace a legitimate user and get access to the system, by tracking each device and, wherever possible, by combining information related to the interaction between devices.

In this thesis, the candidate will carry on research activities according to the following steps:

-Analysis of current state of the art on wireless network spoofing attacks and on the use of position information to enforce device identification and access security, and identification of research directions;

-Definition of spoofing attack detection strategies based on indoor positioning, tackling static and dynamic radio environments, and including both centralized solutions, where a central entity collects data and takes decisions, and distributed solutions where users cooperate and share information to both gather position information and counteract spoofing attacks;

-Design and implementation of an indoor positioning system based on multiple wireless technologies capable of supporting and enabling the proposed attack detection strategies, taking into account in particular recent advances in the support for multiple positioning information sources introduced in recent 3GPP Releases for 5G;

-Simulation of an indoor localization environment, taking into account propagation effects (multipath, mobile and stationary targets, movement of persons, etc...) and access protocols, and test of the proposed system in this environment in terms of positioning accuracy;

-Introduction of spoofing attacks in the simulation environment and evaluation of the robustness of the attack detection strategies supported by the proposed indoor localization system;

-Implementation of the proposed system and of spoofing attack techniques in an experimental positioning testbed using locally deployed WiFi, BLE and UWB infrastructure as well as 4G and 5G commercial networks, in order to support performance evaluation of both positioning accuracy and successful attack detection rate in real world scenarios.