5,258 research outputs found
Inferring Person-to-person Proximity Using WiFi Signals
Today's societies are enveloped in an ever-growing telecommunication
infrastructure. This infrastructure offers important opportunities for sensing
and recording a multitude of human behaviors. Human mobility patterns are a
prominent example of such a behavior which has been studied based on cell phone
towers, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi networks as proxies for location. However,
while mobility is an important aspect of human behavior, understanding complex
social systems requires studying not only the movement of individuals, but also
their interactions. Sensing social interactions on a large scale is a technical
challenge and many commonly used approaches---including RFID badges or
Bluetooth scanning---offer only limited scalability. Here we show that it is
possible, in a scalable and robust way, to accurately infer person-to-person
physical proximity from the lists of WiFi access points measured by smartphones
carried by the two individuals. Based on a longitudinal dataset of
approximately 800 participants with ground-truth interactions collected over a
year, we show that our model performs better than the current state-of-the-art.
Our results demonstrate the value of WiFi signals in social sensing as well as
potential threats to privacy that they imply
Managing big data experiments on smartphones
The explosive number of smartphones with ever growing sensing and computing capabilities have brought a paradigm shift to many traditional domains of the computing field. Re-programming smartphones and instrumenting them for application testing and data gathering at scale is currently a tedious and time-consuming process that poses significant logistical challenges. Next generation smartphone applications are expected to be much larger-scale and complex, demanding that these undergo evaluation and testing under different real-world datasets, devices and conditions. In this paper, we present an architecture for managing such large-scale data management experiments on real smartphones. We particularly present the building blocks of our architecture that encompassed smartphone sensor data collected by the crowd and organized in our big data repository. The given datasets can then be replayed on our testbed comprising of real and simulated smartphones accessible to developers through a web-based interface. We present the applicability of our architecture through a case study that involves the evaluation of individual components that are part of a complex indoor positioning system for smartphones, coined Anyplace, which we have developed over the years. The given study shows how our architecture allows us to derive novel insights into the performance of our algorithms and applications, by simplifying the management of large-scale data on smartphones
Active User Authentication for Smartphones: A Challenge Data Set and Benchmark Results
In this paper, automated user verification techniques for smartphones are
investigated. A unique non-commercial dataset, the University of Maryland
Active Authentication Dataset 02 (UMDAA-02) for multi-modal user authentication
research is introduced. This paper focuses on three sensors - front camera,
touch sensor and location service while providing a general description for
other modalities. Benchmark results for face detection, face verification,
touch-based user identification and location-based next-place prediction are
presented, which indicate that more robust methods fine-tuned to the mobile
platform are needed to achieve satisfactory verification accuracy. The dataset
will be made available to the research community for promoting additional
research.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. Best poster award at BTAS 201
Defending against Sybil Devices in Crowdsourced Mapping Services
Real-time crowdsourced maps such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic,
congestion, accidents and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how
lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based {\em
Sybil devices} that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security
and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with
limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and
accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we
describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of
virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user
populations while avoiding detection. We propose a new approach to defend
against Sybil devices based on {\em co-location edges}, authenticated records
that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over
time, co-location edges combine to form large {\em proximity graphs} that
attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of
virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using
large-scale simulations, and discuss how they can be used to dramatically
reduce the impact of attacks against crowdsourced mapping services.Comment: Measure and integratio
Group-In: Group Inference from Wireless Traces of Mobile Devices
This paper proposes Group-In, a wireless scanning system to detect static or
mobile people groups in indoor or outdoor environments. Group-In collects only
wireless traces from the Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices for group inference.
The key problem addressed in this work is to detect not only static groups but
also moving groups with a multi-phased approach based only noisy wireless
Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSIs) observed by multiple wireless
scanners without localization support. We propose new centralized and
decentralized schemes to process the sparse and noisy wireless data, and
leverage graph-based clustering techniques for group detection from short-term
and long-term aspects. Group-In provides two outcomes: 1) group detection in
short time intervals such as two minutes and 2) long-term linkages such as a
month. To verify the performance, we conduct two experimental studies. One
consists of 27 controlled scenarios in the lab environments. The other is a
real-world scenario where we place Bluetooth scanners in an office environment,
and employees carry beacons for more than one month. Both the controlled and
real-world experiments result in high accuracy group detection in short time
intervals and sampling liberties in terms of the Jaccard index and pairwise
similarity coefficient.Comment: This work has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under
Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT and No.871249 LOCUS projects. The
content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the EU.
Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely
with the authors. Proc. of ACM/IEEE IPSN'20, 202
- …