Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#2The article mentions that the required permissions are "very common permissions", and then in the next paragraph says that 179 apps on the Google Play store require those permissions. As of July 2014, there were 1.3 million apps in the app store [1]. That's ~0.014% of the apps on the store. Not exactly "very common" in my mind. Although the remark that they are "unlikely to raise suspicion" is valid, especially for the typical consumer, who probably isn't reading the permissions anyway.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play#Android_application...
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#3The article mentions that the required permissions are "very common permissions", and then in the next paragraph says that 179 apps on the Google Play store require those permissions. As of July 2014, there were 1.3 million apps in the app store [1]. That's ~0.014% of the apps on the store. Not exactly "very common" in my mind. Although the remark that they are "unlikely to raise suspicion" is valid, especially for t…
I can see a popup message of 'we tune our app based on your current power levels' or similar being quite persuasive in this regard too.
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#4So what makes this specific to Android phones? Developers can't (get permission to) access this information on other platforms?
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#5Original research paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03182
PDF link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03182v1.pdf
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#6So what makes this specific to Android phones? Developers can't (get permission to) access this information on other platforms?
I think it's their research that makes it Android specific, as in, they only researched Android.
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#7Original research paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03182 PDF link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03182v1.pdf
This snippet (from the PDF) reveals the effectiveness of the technique:
"To evaluate the first algorithm for distinguishing routes we recorded reference profiles for several different routes. We used a dataset of 43 profiles for 4 different routes about 19 kilometers each. Driving in different directions along the same roads (from point A to B vs. from point B to A) is considered two different routes. We perform a leave-one-out cross validation, each time using one of the profiles for testing. Figure 5 is a confusion matrix, which shows a high success rate in classifying the routes. The achieved successful classification rate in this case was 93%."
So, given a bunch of known routes (like a stretch of highway), this algorithm is able to match your phone's battery-usage signature to one of those routes, sort of like how a service like SoundHound is able to identify a piece of music based off of a few seconds' recording.
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#8This is really selling a quite interesting intellectual effort on meaningless paranoia. Who would have any interest in tracking people in this manner?
Any government based group can grab the data much more conveniently via the phone towers. Anyone else? Well you've got to trick someone into downloading this thing, so it's probably not that good for targeting a specific individual.
If you can think up some nefarious scheme which involves grabbing lots of peoples locations, just get permissions to use GPS or cell location, way more apps have that privilege. I'm not sure what you do with it afterwards though.
New research reveals people can be tracked just by watching where they go...
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#9Original research paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03182 PDF link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03182v1.pdf
This snippet (from the PDF) reveals the effectiveness of the technique: "To evaluate the first algorithm for distinguishing routes we recorded reference profiles for several different routes. We used a dataset of 43 profiles for 4 different routes about 19 kilometers each. Driving in different directions along the same roads (from point A to B vs. from point B to A) is considered two different routes. We perform a le…
But that if the battery discharges exactly the same. I think that is not the case, for example the battery when is at 50% might discharge (doing the exact thing) differently than when is at 20%. Maybe the battery is not well calibrated or the internal part of the battery are more wasted than others.
Re: Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones
#10The article mentions that the required permissions are "very common permissions", and then in the next paragraph says that 179 apps on the Google Play store require those permissions. As of July 2014, there were 1.3 million apps in the app store [1]. That's ~0.014% of the apps on the store. Not exactly "very common" in my mind. Although the remark that they are "unlikely to raise suspicion" is valid, especially for t…
The typical consumer would probably just give the app access to the GPS. The hard part is getting them to download it.
Interesting research but not the most practical attack.