Biblio
With the proliferation of smartphones, a novel sensing paradigm called Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) has emerged very recently. However, the attacks and faults in MCS cause a serious false data problem. Observing the intrinsic low dimensionality of general monitoring data and the sparsity of false data, false data detection can be performed based on the separation of normal data and anomalies. Although the existing separation algorithm based on Direct Robust Matrix Factorization (DRMF) is proven to be effective, requiring iteratively performing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for low-rank matrix approximation would result in a prohibitively high accumulated computation cost when the data matrix is large. In this work, we observe the quick false data location feature from our empirical study of DRMF, based on which we propose an intelligent Light weight Low Rank and False Matrix Separation algorithm (LightLRFMS) that can reuse the previous result of the matrix decomposition to deduce the one for the current iteration step. Our algorithm can largely speed up the whole iteration process. From a theoretical perspective, we validate that LightLRFMS only requires one round of SVD computation and thus has very low computation cost. We have done extensive experiments using a PM 2.5 air condition trace and a road traffic trace. Our results demonstrate that LightLRFMS can achieve very good false data detection performance with the same highest detection accuracy as DRMF but with up to 10 times faster speed thanks to its lower computation cost.
Modern computer peripherals are diverse in their capabilities and functionality, ranging from keyboards and printers to smartphones and external GPUs. In recent years, peripherals increasingly connect over a small number of standardized communication protocols, including USB, Bluetooth, and NFC. The host operating system is responsible for managing these devices; however, malicious peripherals can request additional functionality from the OS resulting in system compromise, or can craft data packets to exploit vulnerabilities within OS software stacks. Defenses against malicious peripherals to date only partially cover the peripheral attack surface and are limited to specific protocols (e.g., USB). In this paper, we propose Linux (e)BPF Modules (LBM), a general security framework that provides a unified API for enforcing protection against malicious peripherals within the Linux kernel. LBM leverages the eBPF packet filtering mechanism for performance and extensibility and we provide a high-level language to facilitate the development of powerful filtering functionality. We demonstrate how LBM can provide host protection against malicious USB, Bluetooth, and NFC devices; we also instantiate and unify existing defenses under the LBM framework. Our evaluation shows that the overhead introduced by LBM is within 1 μs per packet in most cases, application and system overhead is negligible, and LBM outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions. To our knowledge, LBM is the first security framework designed to provide comprehensive protection against malicious peripherals within the Linux kernel.
We propose an efficient and secure two-server password-only remote user authentication protocol for consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones and laptops. Our protocol works on-top of any existing trust model, like Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL). The proposed protocol is secure against dictionary and impersonation attacks.
With the growth of smartphone sales and app usage, fingerprinting and identification of smartphone apps have become a considerable threat to user security and privacy. Traffic analysis is one of the most common methods for identifying apps. Traditional countermeasures towards traffic analysis includes traffic morphing and multipath routing. The basic idea of multipath routing is to increase the difficulty for adversary to eavesdrop all traffic by splitting traffic into several subflows and transmitting them through different routes. Previous works in multipath routing mainly focus on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) or Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). In this paper, we propose a multipath routing scheme for smartphones with edge network assistance to mitigate traffic analysis attack. We consider an adversary with limited capability, that is, he can only intercept the traffic of one node following certain attack probability, and try to minimize the traffic an adversary can intercept. We formulate our design as a flow routing optimization problem. Then a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Finally, we present the simulation results for our scheme and justify that our scheme can effectively protect smartphones from traffic analysis attack.
In this paper, we discuss the digital forensic procedure and techniques for analyzing the local artifacts from four popular Instant Messaging applications in Android. As part of our findings, the user chat messages details and contacts were investigated for each application. By using two smartphones with different brands and the latest Android operating systems as experimental objects, we conducted digital investigations in a forensically sound manner. We summarize our findings regarding the different Instant Messaging chat modes and the corresponding encryption status of artifacts for each of the four applications. Our findings can be helpful to many mobile forensic investigations. Additionally, these findings may present values to Android system developers, Android mobile app developers, mobile security researchers as well as mobile users.
To prevent users' privacy from leakage, more and more mobile devices employ biometric-based authentication approaches, such as fingerprint, face recognition, voiceprint authentications, etc., to enhance the privacy protection. However, these approaches are vulnerable to replay attacks. Although state-of-art solutions utilize liveness verification to combat the attacks, existing approaches are sensitive to ambient environments, such as ambient lights and surrounding audible noises. Towards this end, we explore liveness verification of user authentication leveraging users' lip movements, which are robust to noisy environments. In this paper, we propose a lip reading-based user authentication system, LipPass, which extracts unique behavioral characteristics of users' speaking lips leveraging build-in audio devices on smartphones for user authentication. We first investigate Doppler profiles of acoustic signals caused by users' speaking lips, and find that there are unique lip movement patterns for different individuals. To characterize the lip movements, we propose a deep learning-based method to extract efficient features from Doppler profiles, and employ Support Vector Machine and Support Vector Domain Description to construct binary classifiers and spoofer detectors for user identification and spoofer detection, respectively. Afterwards, we develop a binary tree-based authentication approach to accurately identify each individual leveraging these binary classifiers and spoofer detectors with respect to registered users. Through extensive experiments involving 48 volunteers in four real environments, LipPass can achieve 90.21% accuracy in user identification and 93.1% accuracy in spoofer detection.
We regularly use communication apps like Facebook and WhatsApp on our smartphones, and the exchange of media, particularly images, has grown at an exponential rate. There are over 3 billion images shared every day on Whatsapp alone. In such a scenario, the management of images on a mobile device has become highly inefficient, and this leads to problems like low storage, manual deletion of images, disorganization etc. In this paper, we present a solution to tackle these issues by automatically classifying every image on a smartphone into a set of predefined categories, thereby segregating spam images from them, allowing the user to delete them seamlessly.
Security in smartphones has become one of the major concerns, with prolific growth in its usage scenario. Many applications are available for Android users to protect their applications and data. But all these security applications are not easily accessible for persons with disabilities. For persons with color blindness, authentication mechanisms pose user interface related issues. Color blind users find the inaccessible and complex design in the interface difficult to access and interpret mobile locks. This paper focuses on a novel method for providing color and touch sensitivity based dot pattern lock. This Model automatically replaces the existing display style of a pattern lock with a new user preferred color combination. In addition Pressure Gradient Input (PGI) has been incorporated to enhance authentication strength. The feedback collected from users shows that this accessible security application is easy to use without any major access barrier.
The veil of anonymity provided by smartphones with pre-paid SIM cards, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and distributed networks like Tor has drastically complicated the task of identifying users of social media during forensic investigations. In some cases, the text of a single posted message will be the only clue to an author's identity. How can we accurately predict who that author might be when the message may never exceed 140 characters on a service like Twitter? For the past 50 years, linguists, computer scientists, and scholars of the humanities have been jointly developing automated methods to identify authors based on the style of their writing. All authors possess peculiarities of habit that influence the form and content of their written works. These characteristics can often be quantified and measured using machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the methods of authorship attribution that can be applied to the problem of social media forensics. Furthermore, we examine emerging supervised learning-based methods that are effective for small sample sizes, and provide step-by-step explanations for several scalable approaches as instructional case studies for newcomers to the field. We argue that there is a significant need in forensics for new authorship attribution algorithms that can exploit context, can process multi-modal data, and are tolerant to incomplete knowledge of the space of all possible authors at training time.
Opportunistic Networks are delay-tolerant mobile networks with intermittent node contacts in which data is transferred with the store-carry-forward principle. Owners of smartphones and smart objects form such networks due to their social behaviour. Opportunistic Networking can be used in remote areas with no access to the Internet, to establish communication after disasters, in emergency situations or to bypass censorship, but also in parallel to familiar networking. In this work, we create a mobile network application that connects Android devices over Wi-Fi, offers identification and encryption, and gathers information for routing in the network. The network application is constructed in such a way that third party applications can use the network application as network layer to send and receive data packets. We create secure and reliable connections while maintaining a high transmission speed, and with the gathered information about the network we offer knowledge for state of the art routing protocols. We conduct tests on connectivity, transmission range and speed, battery life and encryption speed and show a proof of concept for routing in the network.
Crowd management in urban settings has mostly relied on either classical, non-automated mechanisms or spontaneous notifications/alerts through social networks. Such management techniques are heavily marred by lack of comprehensive control, especially in terms of averting risks in a manner that ensures crowd safety and enables prompt emergency response. In this paper, we propose a Markov Decision Process Scheme MDP to realize a smart infrastructure that is directly aimed at crowd management. A key emphasis of the scheme is a robust and reliable scalability that provides sufficient flexibility to manage a mixed crowd (i.e., pedestrian, cyclers, manned vehicles and unmanned vehicles). The infrastructure also spans various population settings (e.g., roads, buildings, game arenas, etc.). To realize a reliable and scalable crowd management scheme, the classical MDP is decomposed into Local MDPs with smaller action-state spaces. Preliminarily results show that the MDP decomposition can reduce the system global cost and facilitate fast convergence to local near-optimal solution for each L-MDP.
We develop and evaluate a data hiding method that enables smartphones to encrypt and embed sensitive information into carrier streams of sensor data. Our evaluation considers multiple handsets and a variety of data types, and we demonstrate that our method has a computational cost that allows real-time data hiding on smartphones with negligible distortion of the carrier stream. These characteristics make it suitable for smartphone applications involving privacy-sensitive data such as medical monitoring systems and digital forensics tools.
We develop and evaluate a data hiding method that enables smartphones to encrypt and embed sensitive information into carrier streams of sensor data. Our evaluation considers multiple handsets and a variety of data types, and we demonstrate that our method has a computational cost that allows real-time data hiding on smartphones with negligible distortion of the carrier stream. These characteristics make it suitable for smartphone applications involving privacy-sensitive data such as medical monitoring systems and digital forensics tools.
User uses smartphones for web surfing and browsing data. Many smartphones are embedded with inbuilt location aware system called GPS [Global Positioning System]. Using GPS user have to register and share his all private information to the LBS server. LBS is nothing but Location Based Service. Simply user sends the query to the LBS server. Then what is happening the LBS server gives a private information regarding particular user location. There will be a possibility to misuse this information so using mobile crowd method hides user location from LBS server and avoid sharing of privacy information with server. Our solution does not required to change the LBS server architecture.
Smartphones are a new type of mobile devices that users can install additional mobile software easily. In the almost all smartphone applications, client-server model is used because end-to-end communication is prevented by NAT routers. Recently, some smartphone applications provide real time services such as voice and video communication, online games etc. In these applications, end-to-end communication is suitable to reduce transmission delay and achieve efficient network usage. Also, IP mobility and security are important matters. However, the conventional IP mobility mechanisms are not suitable for these applications because most mechanisms are assumed to be installed in OS kernel. We have developed a novel IP mobility mechanism called NTMobile (Network Traversal with Mobility). NTMobile supports end-to-end IP mobility in IPv4 and IPv6 networks, however, it is assumed to be installed in Linux kernel as with other technologies. In this paper, we propose a new type of end-to-end mobility platform that provides end-to-end communication, mobility, and also secure data exchange functions in the application layer for smartphone applications. In the platform, we use NTMobile, which is ported as the application program. Then, we extend NTMobile to be suitable for smartphone devices and to provide secure data exchange. Client applications can achieve secure end-to-end communication and secure data exchange by sharing an encryption key between clients. Users also enjoy IP mobility which is the main function of NTMobile in each application. Finally, we confirmed that the developed module can work on Android system and iOS system.
Smartphones are a new type of mobile devices that users can install additional mobile software easily. In the almost all smartphone applications, client-server model is used because end-to-end communication is prevented by NAT routers. Recently, some smartphone applications provide real time services such as voice and video communication, online games etc. In these applications, end-to-end communication is suitable to reduce transmission delay and achieve efficient network usage. Also, IP mobility and security are important matters. However, the conventional IP mobility mechanisms are not suitable for these applications because most mechanisms are assumed to be installed in OS kernel. We have developed a novel IP mobility mechanism called NTMobile (Network Traversal with Mobility). NTMobile supports end-to-end IP mobility in IPv4 and IPv6 networks, however, it is assumed to be installed in Linux kernel as with other technologies. In this paper, we propose a new type of end-to-end mobility platform that provides end-to-end communication, mobility, and also secure data exchange functions in the application layer for smartphone applications. In the platform, we use NTMobile, which is ported as the application program. Then, we extend NTMobile to be suitable for smartphone devices and to provide secure data exchange. Client applications can achieve secure end-to-end communication and secure data exchange by sharing an encryption key between clients. Users also enjoy IP mobility which is the main function of NTMobile in each application. Finally, we confirmed that the developed module can work on Android system and iOS system.
In this work we design and develop Montage for real-time multi-user formation tracking and localization by off-the-shelf smartphones. Montage achieves submeter-level tracking accuracy by integrating temporal and spatial constraints from user movement vector estimation and distance measuring. In Montage we designed a suite of novel techniques to surmount a variety of challenges in real-time tracking, without infrastructure and fingerprints, and without any a priori user-specific (e.g., stride-length and phone-placement) or site-specific (e.g., digitalized map) knowledge. We implemented, deployed and evaluated Montage in both outdoor and indoor environment. Our experimental results (847 traces from 15 users) show that the stride-length estimated by Montage over all users has error within 9cm, and the moving-direction estimated by Montage is within 20°. For realtime tracking, Montage provides meter-second-level formation tracking accuracy with off-the-shelf mobile phones.