Decentralized Proof-of-Location for Content Provenance: Towards Capture-Time Authenticity
For cyber-physical systems requiring trustworthy sensor data, this work addresses the problem of verifying that data was captured at a specific time and place without centralized trust.
The paper proposes a decentralized Proof-of-Location architecture with witnessing zones to ensure capture-time authenticity of sensor data, improving trustworthiness and resilience against fabricated events in cyber-physical systems.
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.