Battery power alone can be used to track Android phones

Post by throwawayaway » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

PJDK wrote: post #8

This 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 s…

Post by jahnu » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

ttty wrote: post #9

jawns wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by jchrisa » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

Post by lione » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

ttty wrote: post #9

jawns wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by zipperhead » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #10

SifJar wrote: post #2

The 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.