Android-Based Side Channel Attacks and Defenses
Speaker/Bio
Ari Trachtenberg is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University.
Abstract
Today's smartphones frequently place a wide variety of sensors well within
our personal spaces, places where the appearance of foreign objects or people would
make us feel decidedly uncomfortable. Phone designers try to mitigate this intrusion by
imposing restrictions on which applications and subsystems can access sensor data at
various times. Unfortunately, these restrictions are generally insufficient to protect user
privacy, as sensor information can leak to unapproved destinations through side-channels
(and some basic machine learning). We will review some of the known side-channel attacks
on or utilizing various Android sensors, such as the microphone, speakers (yes, they are
sensors!), camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, global positioning system, or network traffic.
Throughout the talk, we will describe some of our own research projects in the field.
Reference