Energy Harvesting Wearables Can Tell Which Train Route You Have Taken

摘要

Location privacy is an important concern for the users of mobile devices and this private information can be identified using the embedded motion sensors in these devices. This paper highlights the privacy leakage resulting from unrestricted access to seemingly innocuous generated patterns of vibration energy harvesting (VEH) circuits in mobile devices. We investigate that by monitoring the VEH generated patterns, a malware application can infer which train route the passenger has taken, violating her privacy. We collected real-world motion data for 4 distinct train routes in the Sydney metropolitan area. Our results show that the passenger's train route can be inferred with an average accuracy of 97.2% for a journey of 7 stations, confirming the rich contextual information embedded in VEH data and to light the associated privacy risks in releasing this data.