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

尽管我们越来越依赖移动的手机来完成各种日常任务，但即使对专家来说，它们的操作在很大程度上仍然是不透明的。移动的用户很少了解他们的移动的应用程序如何在网络中运行和执行，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的测量平台：ICSI Haystack来克服以前方法的局限性。Haystack提供了一种新颖且灵活的移动的Vantage位置，能够将真实世界的移动的流量与用户输入和高保真设备活动大规模地关联起来，同时还实现了帮助移动的用户保持对其移动的流量和个人数据的控制的机制。研究界、运营商和监管机构也将从新的测量机制和收集的数据中受益，以保护移动的用户，并提高移动的应用程序和跟踪器的运营透明度。为了实现这一愿景，该项目开发了新的技术，通过使用本地平台支持在设备上的用户空间捕获用户流量来执行高保真移动的测量。因此，Haystack将可供任何人从Google Play等传统应用商店安装，从而提高用户覆盖率。为了获得对移动的生态系统的真正深入和广泛的理解，Haystack利用其本地操作将网络流量与用户输入和本地上下文相关联，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。至关重要的是，Haystack的系统设计必须是灵活的和可扩展的，以使研究人员能够进行广泛的移动的测量，以科普新的移动的技术，并达到广泛的移动的用户的横截面。Haystack能够在用户设备中将所有这些功能联合收割机组合在一起，这使得它成为进行各种移动的测量的理想Vantage位置，例如野外移动的流量表征、隐私泄漏检测、识别在线跟踪服务、审计应用程序安全性和网络性能测量。

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.