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Home » Devices That Tell on You: Privacy Trends in Consumer Ubiquitous Computing
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Devices That Tell on You: Privacy Trends in Consumer Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract: 

We analyze three new consumer electronic gadgets in order to gauge the privacy and security trends in mass-market UbiComp devices. Our study of the Slingbox Pro uncovers a new information leakage vector for encrypted streaming multimedia. By exploiting properties of variable bitrate encoding schemes, we show that a passive adversary can determine with high probability the movie that a user is watching via her Slingbox, even when the Slingbox uses encryption. We experimentally evaluated our method against a database of over 100 hours of network traces for 26 distinct movies.

Despite an opportunity to provide significantly more location privacy than existing devices, like RFIDs, we find that an attacker can trivially exploit the Nike+iPod Sport Kit’s design to track users; we demonstrate this with a GoogleMaps-based distributed surveillance system. We also uncover security issues with the way Microsoft Zunes manage their social relationships.

We show how these products’ designers could have significantly raised the bar against some of our attacks. We also use some of our attacks to motivate fundamental security and privacy challenges for future UbiComp devices.

T. Scott Saponas, University of Washington

Jonathan Lester, University of Washington

Carl Hartung, University of Washington

Sameer Agarwal, University of Washington

Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {268498,
author = {T. Scott Saponas and Jonathan Lester and Carl Hartung and Sameer Agarwal and Tadayoshi Kohno},
title = {Devices That Tell on You: Privacy Trends in Consumer Ubiquitous Computing},
booktitle = {16th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 07)},
year = {2007},
address = {Boston, MA },
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/16th-usenix-security-symposium/devices-tell-you-privacy-trends-consumer-ubiquitous},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug,
}
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Paper: 
http://usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/full_papers/saponas/saponas.pdf
Paper (HTML): 
http://usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/full_papers/saponas/saponas_html/index.html
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