Effective Mobile Web User Fingerprinting via Motion Sensors

Zhiju Yang, Rui Zhao, Chuan Yue

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Motion sensors are often equipped on smartphones to enable rich app functionality and interactivity. However, they can also be exploited by attackers as powerful side-channels to compromise users' security and privacy due to the unrestricted sensor data access on modern smartphone platforms. In this paper, we investigate motion sensor based user fingerprinting attacks that can be pervasively performed to severely compromise the privacy of mobile web users. We formulate our user fingerprinting attacks as a typical multi-class classification problem, and design a framework with unified classifiers for effectively performing the attacks. We implement our attacking framework and evaluate it using the motion sensor data collected from 20 volunteers. The evaluation results demonstrate that our attacks are indeed very effective. For example, the user fingerprinting accuracy is higher than 85% by using a classifier unified from seven randomly selected individual classifiers each trained with the motion sensor data of only 10 letter keystrokes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 17th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications and 12th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, Trustcom/BigDataSE 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1398-1405
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781538643877
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 5 2018
Event17th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications and 12th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, Trustcom/BigDataSE 2018 - New York, United States
Duration: Jul 31 2018Aug 3 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - 17th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications and 12th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, Trustcom/BigDataSE 2018

Conference

Conference17th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications and 12th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering, Trustcom/BigDataSE 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period7/31/188/3/18

Keywords

  • Attacks
  • Fingerprinting
  • Motion Sensor
  • Smartphone
  • Web User

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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