Android phones can be easily tracked by apps that calculate battery drain, according to a new paper
by a team of Stanford researchers. Apps merely need access to
smartphone users’ power consumption over time to track their movements,
the researchers say.
Smartphones use more power as they get further away from
cell towers, or if walls and other barriers disrupt communications from
the tower to phone. Researchers say that battery-draining services like
high-speed data use and apps can be removed from the equation using
machine learning algorithms, or software formulas that can learn from,
and sort through the data.
The team built their own software to test their findings
-- a lab-created computer virus they called PowerSpy -- capable of
tracking Android users without GPS tracking data
or the ability to scan
Wi-Fi hotspots. An app given the ability to calculate power consumption
could track a user's location more than two-thirds of the time.
"The malicious app has neither permission to access the GPS nor other location providers [like the] cellular or wi-fi network," Yan Michalevsky
and his team from Stanford University wrote. "We only assume permission
for network connectivity and access to the power data. These are very
common permissions for an application, and are unlikely to raise
suspicion on the part of the victim."
Google offers 179 apps on its Play Store
that request power usage information and require only a few minutes of
power measurements to begin tracking a user's locations, Michaelevsky
wrote. The researchers said that while more apps in the background
caused PowerSpy's accuracy to go down to roughly 20 percent, they could
likely improve the tracking if it was programmed to account for the
battery usage of more apps and services.
No comments:
Post a Comment