12,867 research outputs found
Dynamic Base Station Repositioning to Improve Spectral Efficiency of Drone Small Cells
With recent advancements in drone technology, researchers are now considering
the possibility of deploying small cells served by base stations mounted on
flying drones. A major advantage of such drone small cells is that the
operators can quickly provide cellular services in areas of urgent demand
without having to pre-install any infrastructure. Since the base station is
attached to the drone, technically it is feasible for the base station to
dynamic reposition itself in response to the changing locations of users for
reducing the communication distance, decreasing the probability of signal
blocking, and ultimately increasing the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we
first propose distributed algorithms for autonomous control of drone movements,
and then model and analyse the spectral efficiency performance of a drone small
cell to shed new light on the fundamental benefits of dynamic repositioning. We
show that, with dynamic repositioning, the spectral efficiency of drone small
cells can be increased by nearly 100\% for realistic drone speed, height, and
user traffic model and without incurring any major increase in drone energy
consumption.Comment: Accepted at IEEE WoWMoM 2017 - 9 pages, 2 tables, 4 figure
Using Hover to Compromise the Confidentiality of User Input on Android
We show that the new hover (floating touch) technology, available in a number
of today's smartphone models, can be abused by any Android application running
with a common SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission to record all touchscreen input
into other applications. Leveraging this attack, a malicious application
running on the system is therefore able to profile user's behavior, capture
sensitive input such as passwords and PINs as well as record all user's social
interactions. To evaluate our attack we implemented Hoover, a proof-of-concept
malicious application that runs in the system background and records all input
to foreground applications. We evaluated Hoover with 40 users, across two
different Android devices and two input methods, stylus and finger. In the case
of touchscreen input by finger, Hoover estimated the positions of users' clicks
within an error of 100 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 79%.
Hoover captured users' input by stylus even more accurately, estimating users'
clicks within 2 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 98%. We discuss
ways of mitigating this attack and show that this cannot be done by simply
restricting access to permissions or imposing additional cognitive load on the
users since this would significantly constrain the intended use of the hover
technology.Comment: 11 page
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