NeTS: Medium: HayStack: Fine-grained Visibility and Control of Mobile Traffic for Enhanced Performance, Privacy and Security

NeTS：中：HayStack：移动流量的细粒度可见性和控制，以增强性能、隐私和安全性

• 批准号: 1564329
• 负责人: Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
• 金额: $ 100万
• 依托单位: International Computer Science Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-08-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1564329&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NeTS; Medium; HayStack; Fine; grained

Despite our growing reliance on mobile phones for a wide range of daily tasks, their operation remains largely opaque even for experts. Mobile users have little insight into how their mobile apps operate and perform in the network, into how (or whether) they protect the information that users entrust to them, and with whom they share user's personal information. A number of previous studies have addressed elements of this problem in a partial fashion, trading off analytic comprehensiveness and deployment scale. This project seeks to overcome the limitations of previous approaches by building a handset-, traffic-, and user-centric mobile measurement platform: the ICSI Haystack. Haystack offers a novel and flexible mobile vantage point capable of correlating real-world mobile traffic with user input and high-fidelity device activity at scale while also enabling mechanisms to aid mobile users to stay in control of their mobile traffic and personal data. The research community, operators and regulatory bodies will also benefit from the novel measurement mechanisms and from the data collected in order to safeguard mobile users and to increase the operational transparency of mobile apps and trackers.To achieve this vision, this project develops novel techniques to perform high-fidelity mobile measurements by capturing user traffic in user-space on the device using native platform support. As a result, Haystack will be available for anyone to install from traditional app stores such as Google Play, thereby enhancing user reach. In order to gain a truly in-depth and broad understanding of the mobile ecosystem, Haystack takes advantage of its local operation to correlate network traffic with user input and local context, such as which app generated a particular network flow and device location, obtained from the operating system itself with real network and user stimuli. Critically, Haystack's system design must be flexible and extensible in order to enable researchers to conduct a wide range of mobile measurements, to cope with new mobile technologies, and to reach a broad cross-section of mobile users. The ability to combine all these features together in user devices makes Haystack an ideal vantage point to conduct a wide range of mobile measurements such as mobile traffic characterization in the wild, privacy leak detection, identifying online tracking services, auditing app security, and network performance measurements.

尽管我们越来越依赖手机来处理各种日常任务，但即使对专家来说，手机的操作也在很大程度上仍然不透明。移动用户几乎不了解他们的移动应用程序在网络中的操作和表现，他们如何(或是否)保护用户委托给他们的信息，以及他们与谁共享用户的个人信息。以前的一些研究已经部分地解决了这个问题的要素，权衡了分析的全面性和部署规模。该项目旨在通过构建一个以手机、流量和用户为中心的移动测量平台：ICSI干草堆，来克服以前方法的局限性。Hystack提供了一个新颖而灵活的移动优势点，能够将真实世界的移动流量与用户输入和大规模高保真设备活动关联起来，同时还支持各种机制，帮助移动用户保持对其移动流量和个人数据的控制。研究界、运营商和监管机构也将受益于新的测量机制和收集的数据，以保护移动用户并提高移动应用和跟踪器的操作透明度。为了实现这一愿景，该项目开发了新技术，通过使用本地平台支持捕获设备上用户空间的用户流量来执行高保真移动测量。因此，任何人都可以从Google Play等传统应用商店安装HayStack，从而扩大用户覆盖范围。为了真正深入和广泛地了解移动生态系统，HayStack利用其本地运营的优势，将网络流量与用户输入和本地上下文关联起来，例如哪个应用程序生成了特定的网络流量和设备位置，这些信息是从操作系统本身获得的，具有真实的网络和用户刺激。关键是，HayStack的系统设计必须灵活和可扩展，以便使研究人员能够进行广泛的移动测量，以应对新的移动技术，并接触到广泛的移动用户。在用户设备中将所有这些功能结合在一起的能力使HayStack成为进行各种移动测量的理想优势，例如野外移动流量特征、隐私泄漏检测、识别在线跟踪服务、审计应用程序安全和网络性能测量。