This paper presents a technique for range-independent (also called “range free”) localization of wireless ad hoc sensors that is designed to be robust against subversion.

Previous work on the security of localization in a hostile environment considered only range-dependent algorithms. The authors propose their own localization scheme, called SeRLoc, which makes use of symmetric cryptography and hashing to authenticate and encipher the beacon messages.

Lazos and Poovendran show that their algorithm is resistant to two classes of known attacks against localization schemes: the wormhole attack and the Sybil attack. For comparison, they show that Dv-hop, Amorphous, and APIT (which are three state-of-the-art range free schemes) are vulnerable to such attacks (which is expected, since these schemes do not claim to offer security features).

The authors complete their work by comparing the performance of SeRLoc against these three other schemes (plus Centroid and PIT), in terms of localization error, power consumption, and robustness, with good results. However, they do not compare the results to range-based schemes, or to schemes that require a centralized computation.

The paper is interesting, but a comparison between the security characteristics of SeRLoc and the existing secure range-dependent localization schemes would be helpful, in order to evaluate design tradeoffs between these two classes of algorithms.