Attack Tolerance of RSS-based Fingerprinting

Abstract

This paper studies the performance of Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based fingerprinting positioning methods under different attack scenarios. We discuss different attack models and we compare the accuracy of a commonly used RSS fingerprinting algorithm with a robust version relying on access node visibility, with respect to those attacks. The results show that the robust fingerprinting method does not outperform the traditional fingerprinting method for most attacks, nevertheless, for a few attack types the accuracy improvement, in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), can yield factor two. RSS-based fingerprinting methods are most vulnerable to jamming, spoofing and interchanging of access nodes and least vulnerable to random removal of access nodes.