Toward Practical Decentralized Proof-of-Location via Physical Witnessing Zones

2026-08-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the vulnerability of location claims in digital services, which are easily forged and difficult to verify post hoc, by proposing a decentralized location attestation system grounded in physical witness zones. The system leverages fixed witness devices that actively perform ranging to detect user presence, exchanges attestations over a local mesh network, and records results in a tamper-resistant ledger. Key innovations include the first low-cost hardware prototype, a cross-witness consistency verification mechanism, a freshness-binding scheme resistant to replay attacks, and a physical-layer constraint adaptation that integrates wireless ranging with time synchronization. Indoor experiments demonstrate that the system efficiently generates location proofs with low latency and high accuracy while effectively mitigating replay and adversarial ranging attacks.

Abstract

Digital services increasingly rely on claims that a person, device, or asset was in a specific place at a specific time. Today, those claims often depend on self-reported location data, which is easy to falsify and difficult to verify after the fact. Proof-of-Location (PoL) systems address this gap by turning presence claims into evidence that an independent verifier can later inspect. This paper builds upon recent theoretical work on decentralized PoL architectures and demonstrates how they can move from emulation to a physical prototype built with low-cost hardware. We implement a witnessing zone in which fixed nearby devices measure a prover's presence, exchange claims over a local mesh, and record them in a tamper-evident ledger. Building the prototype required adapting the abstract protocol to physical constraints through witness-initiated ranging, cross-witness consistency checks, and freshness binding against replay. Our controlled indoor evaluation shows that the system can produce accurate, low-latency proof objects while detecting simulated replay and malicious-ranging attacks. The result is a reusable experimental baseline for next-generation digital trust infrastructure, that exposes the remaining calibration, verifier-independence, radio-integrity, and scaling requirements for decentralized location evidence, where physical presence claims can be independently checked under real radio, networking, and timing conditions.

Problem

• Proof-of-Location
• decentralized
• physical witnessing
• location verification
• tamper-evident

Innovation

• Proof-of-Location
• decentralized verification
• physical witnessing
• tamper-evident ledger
• mesh networking