Decentralized Proof-of-Location for Content Provenance: Towards Capture-Time Authenticity

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 29 Mar 2026] Decentralized Proof-of-Location for Content Provenance: Towards Capture-Time Authenticity Eduardo Brito, Fernando Castillo, Amnir Hadachi, Ulrich Norbisrath, Jonathan Heiss Reliable use of real-world data requires confidence that recorded evidence reflects what actually occurred at the moment of capture. In adversarial or incentive-misaligned cyber-physical settings, device-centric provenance and post-capture verification are insufficient to provide that guarantee. This paper builds on Proof-of-Location (PoL) as a baseline for establishing where and when events take place, and extends it with a witnessing-zone architecture in which multiple independent observers collectively validate physical events. The resulting approach produces auditable evidence artifacts that can support downstream systems in cyber-physical settings, without relying on centralized trust. Through representative scenarios and simulation-based evaluation, this paper shows how such architectures improve sensor data trustworthiness and resilience to fabricated or staged events. Comments: This work has been accepted for publication at the 5th International Workshop on Architecting and Engineering Digital Twins (AEDT 2026), to appear in the Companion Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2026) Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.27883 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.27883v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.27883 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Eduardo Ribas Brito [view email] [v1] Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:43:48 UTC (1,456 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs 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?)