He and his students call it SPEProxy. It tells people when their apps are sending data, which can help spot misuse.
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It also offers ways to better protect personal data. It gives phone users control over where their data go, and which data are shared. The computer code that directs how data are used often is buried deep in an app's software. He did not work on the new tool but can appreciate its value. As a computer engineer at Florida International University, in Miami, he studies security for smart devices and other computer systems. They don't know if or when their data are being misused. Krupp's online tool can help raise a person's awareness of all that sharing and selling, he says.
Smartphones store a lot of personal data. Those devices know our names, the names of our friends, our address — and where we are, right now.
Some apps use those data to do their job. A weather app needs to know where a person is to report the local forecast, for example. But those same apps may often send such data on to advertisers as well. Those advertisers will pay well to know how people behave and live.
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Krupp agrees that it is important for phone and tablet users to know where their data go. And that data theft may not be harmless. Those data may reveal when someone leaves home and when they get back. They can show how — and where — people spend their days. Researchers have begun building smartphone programs that track the misuse of such data.
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That means they have to take the phone apart and change the way its computer or software works. And many of the others would not be comfortable breaking into their phones. SPEProxy identifies the misuse of data using an approach that has already been used in medicine to diagnose illness. That medical software collected data from a patient's blood samples and from other measurements.
Then it compared them to those typical of many possible illnesses to make a diagnosis. Krupp's group has now built a new computer program that tracks how apps leak data. It allows users to see what data are leaked, and where they go.
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It also lets a user limit what type of data an app can access from the phone. People in the audience immediately reached for their phones to check on their apps, he says. Right now, people can only track data with the new tool by going to a website. That means it's limited. People may not want to go to the trouble of getting online to track their data. Krupp and his team want to make using it easier. They're working on a version that people could install on their phones.
He's also planning to run a study this spring on how people might use the new tool. But the plethora of highly personal information that smartphones are privy to also makes them powerful potential spies. Along with the familiar camera and microphone, smartphones can pack a slew of other exquisitely sensitive sensors.
Monitoring Software for Mobile Phones, Tablets and Computers
Online app store Google Play has already discovered apps abusing sensor access. Stolen photos and sound bites pose obvious privacy invasions. But even seemingly innocuous sensor data can potentially broadcast sensitive information. These sneaky intrusions may not be happening in real life yet, but concerned researchers in academia and industry are working to head off eventual invasions.
Some scientists have designed invasive apps and tested them on volunteers to shine a light on what smartphones can reveal about their owners. Other researchers are building new smartphone security systems to help protect users from myriad real and hypothetical privacy invasions, from stolen PIN codes to stalking. Motion detectors within smartphones, like the accelerometer and the rotation-sensing gyroscope, could be prime tools for surreptitious data collection.
For the most part, these computer programs are machine-learning algorithms, Al-Haiqi says. Researchers train them to recognize keystrokes by feeding the programs a bunch of motion sensor data labeled with the key tap that produces particular movement.
Since then, a spate of similar studies have come out, with scientists writing code to infer keystrokes on number and letter keyboards on different kinds of phones. Those keystrokes could divulge everything from the password entered on a banking app to the contents of an e-mail or text message. A gyroscope senses how much and in which direction a smartphone rotates with various key taps. A more recent application used a whole fleet of smartphone sensors — including the gyroscope, accelerometer, light sensor and magnetism-measuring magnetometer — to guess PINs.
When tested on a pool of 50 PIN numbers, the app could discern keystrokes with Other researchers have paired motion data with mic recordings, which can pick up the soft sound of a fingertip tapping a screen. One group designed a malicious app that could masquerade as a simple note-taking tool. The app could even listen in the background when the user entered sensitive info on other apps. Al-Haiqi points out, however, that success rates are mostly from tests of keystroke-deciphering techniques in controlled settings — assuming that users hold their phones a certain way or sit down while typing.
How these info-extracting programs fare in a wider range of circumstances remains to be seen. Researchers designed an app, described in in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security , to extract the data signatures of various subway routes from accelerometer readings. In experiments with Samsung smartphones on the subway in Nanjing, China, this tracking app picked out which segments of the subway system a user was riding with at least 59, 81 and 88 percent accuracy — improving as the stretches expanded from three to five to seven stations long.
Subway rides produce smartphone accelerometer readings distinct from other modes of transport. For instance, when a user steps off the train, that jerkier motion involved in walking produces a different signature. Other sensors can be used to track people in more confined spaces: One team synced a smartphone mic and portable speaker to create an on-the-fly sonar system to map movements throughout a house.
Legitimate apps often harvest info, such as search engine and app download history, to sell to advertising companies and other third parties. Take a health insurance company.
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Some safeguards could appear as standalone apps, whereas others are tools that could be built into future operating system updates. If someday the program spots something unusual — like the motion sensors reaping data when a user is just sitting and texting — 6thSense alerts the user. Then the user can check if a recently downloaded app is responsible for this suspicious activity and delete the app from the phone. Fifty users trained Samsung smartphones with 6thSense to recognize their typical sensor activity.
When the researchers fed the 6thSense system examples of benign data from daily activities mixed in with segments of malicious sensor operations, 6thSense picked out the problematic bits with over 96 percent accuracy. Distorting sensor data with the security system DEEProtect curbs the ability of an app, such as a speech-to-text translator, to use sensor readings.
But more distortion for more privacy comes with less accuracy. For example, someone may want an app to transcribe speech but not identify the speaker.