Wearables Security and Privacy

Enhancing user awareness on inferences obtained from fitness trackers data

“…As the BLE traffic of fitness trackers seems to be correlated with the intensity of the user activity, the authors show that it becomes possible for a malicious listener to infer the user's activity, by analysing the BLE traffic analysis. They also present their findings regarding the possibility to A questionnaire where exploratory factor analysis is applied to investigate if there is a relationship between the intention of fitness tracker users to disclose personal data and to continue using the wearable device Users are more likely to continue using a fitness tracker if the anticipated benefits are surpassing their privacy concerns Third-party access to personal data, data used for other purposes than stated, devices collecting too much information, activity monitoring Fietkiewicz and Ilhan (2020) An online survey from EU and USA participants who are current, former or non-users of fitness tracking applications to determine their awareness of data collection and their privacy concerns Users who normally feel insecure about their online data privacy are also more likely to be concerned about the protection of the privacy of their data collected from fitness trackers Third-party access to personal data, profiling Zimmer et al (2020) A survey and semi-structured interviews with fitness trackers users to determine the pros and cons that users notice from their interaction with their devices Users have low levels of privacy concerns, they find that the benefits of using a fitness tracker exceed any disadvantages, they do not perceive data collected from fitness trackers as sensitive and they are not aware of possible privacy threats Third-party access to personal data, third parties can use my data against me The overlooked security and privacy challenges in wearables is the focus of the work by Blasco et al (2019), where the authors identify a number of inferences that can be extracted from sensors data. According to the authors, fitness trackers become an appealing source of interest for cybercriminals, whose attacks may gain access to users biometric data, enabling identity theft, location information which is a major privacy threat or accelerometer data that can be used to infer user activities.…”

DEMIX: Domain-Enforced Memory Isolation for Embedded System

“…In particular, these embedded systems are often programmed in unsafe language such as C/C++, rendering them susceptible to grave security threats such as code injection, buffer overflow, and memory leaks. In fact, it has been shown that various embedded systems have been compromised through these security vulnerabilities [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ], which may lead to potentially fatal consequences. Due to a lack of architectural support, established security solutions for advanced computing systems such as PCs and smartphones are not directly transferable to embedded systems.…”

Rimi

“…For instance, network facilities for infrastructure have been repeatedly targeted for exploitation and abuse by attackers [21]. Additionally, the leakage of personal data stored in wearable devices could cause serious privacy problems [5].…”