ConXsense - Automated Context Classification for Context-Aware Access Control

We present ConXsense, the first framework for context-aware access control on mobile devices based on context classification. Previous context-aware access control systems often require users to laboriously specify detailed policies or they rely on pre-defined policies not adequately reflecting the true preferences of users. We present the design and implementation of a context-aware framework that uses a probabilistic approach to overcome these deficiencies. The framework utilizes context sensing and machine learning to automatically classify contexts according to their security and privacy-related properties. We apply the framework to two important smartphone-related use cases: protection against device misuse using a dynamic device lock and protection against sensory malware. We ground our analysis on a sociological survey examining the perceptions and concerns of users related to contextual smartphone security and analyze the effectiveness of our approach with real-world context data. We also demonstrate the integration of our framework with the FlaskDroid architecture for fine-grained access control enforcement on the Android platform.Comment: Recipient of the Best Paper Awar

Integrating sensor streams in pHealth networks

Personal Health (pHealth) sensor networks are generally used to monitor the wellbeing of both athletes and the general public to inform health specialists of future and often serious ailments. The problem facing these domain experts is the scale and quality of data they must search in order to extract meaningful results. By using peer-to-peer sensor architectures and a mechanism for reducing the search space, we can, to some extent, address the scalability issue. However, synchronisation and normalisation of distributed sensor streams remains a problem in many networks. In the case of pHealth sensor networks, it is crucial for experts to align multiple sensor readings before query or data mining activities can take place. This paper presents a system for clustering and synchronising sensor streams in preparation for user queries