SureRepute: Reputation System for Crowdsourced Location Witnesses

Abstract

Location is an important attribute for many mobile applications but it needs to be verified. For example, a user of a tourism application that gives out rewards can falsify his location to pretend that he has visited many attractions and thus receive benefits without deserving them. To counter these attacks, the system asks users to prove their location through witnesses, i.e., other devices that happen to be at the location at the same time and that can be partially trusted. However, for this approach to be effective, it is important to keep track of the witness behavior over time. Many crowdsourcing applications, like Waze, build up reputations for their users, and rely on user co-location and redundant inputs for data verification.In this work, we present SureRepute, a reputation system capable of withstanding reputation attacks while still maintaining user privacy. The results show that the system is able to protect itself and its configuration is flexible, allowing different trade-offs between security and usability, as required in real-world applications. The experiments show how the reputation system can be easily integrated into existing applications without producing a significant overhead in response times.