Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2019 by the authors. Mobile sensors have already proven to be helpful in different aspects of people’s everyday lives such as fitness, gaming, navigation, etc. However, illegitimate access to these sensors results in a malicious program running with an exploit path. While the users are benefiting from richer and more personalized apps, the growing number of sensors introduces new security and privacy risks to end users and makes the task of sensor management more complex. In this paper, first, we discuss the issues around the security and privacy of mobile sensors. We investigate the available sensors on mainstream mobile devices and study the permission policies that Android, iOS and mobile web browsers offer for them. Second, we reflect the results of two workshops that we organized on mobile sensor security. In these workshops, the participants were introduced to mobile sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps. We evaluated the risk levels perceived by the participants for these sensors after they understood the functionalities of these sensors. The results showed that knowing sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps would not immediately improve the users’ security inference of the actual risks of these sensors. However, other factors such as the prior general knowledge about these sensors and their risks had a strong impact on the users’ perception. We also taught the participants about the ways that they could audit their apps and their permissions. Our findings showed that when mobile users were provided with reasonable choices and intuitive teaching, they could easily self-direct themselves to improve their security and privacy. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators, app developers, and mobile users to contribute toward awareness and education on this topic.
Author(s): Mehrnezhad M, Toreini E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Informatics
Year: 2019
Volume: 6
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 24/01/2019
Acceptance date: 18/01/2019
Date deposited: 25/02/2019
ISSN (electronic): 2227-9709
Publisher: MDPI
URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics6010007
DOI: 10.3390/informatics6010007
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric