Making sense of sensors: mobile sensor security awareness and education

Abstract

Mobile sensors have already proved to be helpful to different aspects of people's everyday lives such as fitness, gaming, navigation, etc. However, illegitimate access to these sensors provides 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 security and privacy of mobile sensors. Second, we reflect the results of a workshop which we organized on mobile sensor security. In this workshop, the participants are introduced to mobile sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps. We evaluate the risk levels perceived by the participants for these sensors after they learn their functionalities. The results show that knowing sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps would not immediately improve the users' security inference of the actual risks of these sensors. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators, app developers, and mobile users to contribute toward awareness and education on this topic.