Privacy Protection Mechanisms Of Smartphone

Mobile Internet has brought the development of IT to a new era, which has a deep meaning for human society. However, as people enjoy the convenience brought by mobile internet, more personal information is involved at the same time. Therefore mobile users face the security threat of privacy. Mobile devices usually contain a lot of users’ privacy information, once the user privacy leaks it will cause serious consequence and inestimable loss without suitable protection measures. As privacy appears to be an important security problem, mobile users become more concerned about their privacy.The research on privacy protection is emerging in recent years, while there are still some issues that need to be further studied in privacy protection of smartphone. First, there is a problem that applications on the mobile device obtain users’privacy excessively. Traditional privacy protection mechanisms simply block the access of users’data from applications and services, which leads to low real-time and utility. Moreover, they focus on preventing privacy leaks from mobile devices, instead of building privacy policy based on granularity. Second, there is a problem on privacy leaks via sensors. As privacy leaks via sensors on mobile devices become more and more frequent, existing privacy protection mechanisms can not cover all the bases, especially for the potential risks via sensors. Third, there is a problem on retrieving missing mobile devices. Loss of device is the most concerned way of privacy leaks, however traditional tracking services need to monitor the location of the devices continuously, which leads to a psychological barrier for people to accept tracking services. To solve above problems, it is necessary to research the privacy protection of smartphone.First, for the problem that applications on the mobile device obtain users’ privacy excessively, a location privacy control based on granularity is presented in this research. It provides different level of location privacy for location-based services. It obfuscates the accurate locations and returns them to different location-based services, and the privacy policy is customized by the user. It can achieve real-time location privacy while generating negligible influence on utility for the applications without relying on any third party.Second, for the problem of privacy leaks via sensors, the concept of sensor policy customization is presented in this research. It allows users to control the sensor privacy of third-party applications. Based on this, to prevent malicious application from accessing sensors at run time, an on-demand privacy protection mechanism for mobile sensors is presented. By evaluating the mechanism with several typical perceptual applications that perform diverse tasks, it is shown both practical and lightweight:it can protect user’s privacy efficiently while maintaining utility.Third, a privacy-preserving location tracking mechanism based on cloud storage is presented in this research to solve the problem of retrieving missing mobile devices. Cloud computing is introduced in the mechanism to improve the ablitiy of mobile devices, and it uses cloud storage controlled by users as storage facilities. With suitable encryption mechanism and location updating algorithm based on position sensing, the evaluation shows that it is both practical and lightweight:it generates a small amount of data flow and its distributed architecture provides strong guarantees of location privacy while preserving the ability to efficiently track missing devices.In summary, this research can provide different granularity of privacy protection for mobile devices, or build privacy policy for applications to protect location and sensor privacy according to the requirement of users, or retrieve missing devices using privacy-preserving location tracking mechanism based on cloud storage.