TWC: Small: Secure Mobile Devices through Multiple Lines of Defense

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The human society is in a wireless and mobile era. People are enjoying quality life brought by mobile devices while subject to growing cyber threats. There is thus a pressing need to develop secure and usable protection mechanisms for mobile devices. This proposal outlines a challenging research plan on developing, implementing, and evaluating secure and usable countermeasures against new attacks on mobile devices. The scientific promise of the proposed research will expand the fundamental understandings about mobile device security. Successful development and implementations of the proposed techniques will have profound impact on secure mobile device usage, thus significantly improving the information security of mobile users in U.S. and around the world.The proposed research consists of four thrusts. The first thrust is to develop secure and usable defenses against video-assisted keystroke inference attacks in which an attacker can infer a user's typed inputs on the touchscreen by recording and analyzing the video of the device backside during the user's input process. The second thrust is to develop secure and usable defenses against power-assisted app inference attacks where an attacker intrudes the victim's mobile device through an infected app and then accesses the power profile of the device. The third thrust is to develop secure and usable defenses against device losses/thefts, which automatically lock a mobile device once it leaves the vicinity of its owner. The key idea of the proposed defenses is to let a mobile device automatically, quickly, and accurately recognize its physical separation from its owner by detecting and analyzing the changes in wireless signals. The last thrust is to implement and evaluate the discovered attacks and proposed defenses. The implementation and evaluation will be conducted on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Universal Software Radio Peripheral platforms.