Graduated Trust Gating for IoT Location Verification: Trading Off Detection and Proof Escalation

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 4 Apr 2026] Graduated Trust Gating for IoT Location Verification: Trading Off Detection and Proof Escalation Yoshiyuki Ootani IoT location services accept client-reported GPS coordinates at face value, yet spoofing is trivial with consumer-grade tools. Existing spoofing detectors output a binary decision, forcing system designers to choose between high false-deny and high false-accept rates. We propose a graduated trust gate that computes a multi-signal integrity score and maps it to three actions: PROCEED, STEP-UP, or DENY, where STEP-UP invokes a stronger verifier such as a zero-knowledge proximity proof. A session-latch mechanism ensures that a single suspicious fix blocks the entire session, preventing post-transition score recovery. Under an idealized step-up oracle on 10,000 synthetic traces, the gate enables strict thresholds (theta_p = 0.9) that a binary gate cannot safely use: at matched false-accept rate (11%), the graduated gate maintains zero false-deny rate versus 0.05% for binary, with 5 microseconds scoring overhead. Real-device traces from an Android smartphone demonstrate the session-latch mechanism and show that a nearby mock location (~550 m) evades theta_p = 0.7 but is routed to step-up at theta_p = 0.9. Signal ablation identifies a minimal two-signal configuration (F1 = 0.84) suitable for resource-constrained scoring layers. Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables, 1 algorithm Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.03896 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.03896v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03896 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yoshiyuki Ootani [view email] [v1] Sat, 4 Apr 2026 23:42:56 UTC (77 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)