Shooting to the Stars: Secure Location Verification via Meteor Burst Communications

We introduce Shooting to the Stars, in short SttS, a secure location verification algorithm leveraging Meteor Burst Communications (MBC)-the ephemeral, ionized stripe generated by meteors. SttS leverages intrinsic peculiarities of MBC, such as robustness to both eavesdropping and jamming, while also enjoying ease of deployment and secure authentication of the transmitting source. SttS enables the verification of the position of a passive receiver by exploiting the radio reflection properties of ephemeral meteor trails, combined with multiple anchors (N) that can be deployed even hundreds of Km from the receiver itself. We developed a complete theoretical model for our solution-rooted on sound literature and past experimental campaigns-, and fully tested it with extensive simulations. Results show that SttS is highly reliable in guaranteeing position verification, and that it can detect a location spoofing attack even when up to N2 -1 anchors are compromised by an adversary. Finally, it is completely tunable, trading off accuracy with the number of observed trails-for instance, observing just 200 trails enables to correctly classify the the location as valid or not with a 0.99 probability.