WheelLogger: Driver Tracing Using Smart Watch

摘要

Location-related data is one of the most sensitive data for user privacy. Theft of location-related information on mobile device poses serious threats to users. Even though the extant confirmation of permissions feature on modern smart devices can prevent direct leakage of information from location-related sensors, recent research has shown that leakage of location-related information is possible through indirect, side-channel attacks. In this paper, we show that the travel path of a vehicle can be inferred without acknowledging the user using a zero-permission smart watch application. The sensor we used in our experiment is the accelerometer sensor on Apple Watch. We find that a targeted user can be traced with 83% accuracy. We suggest that our approach may be used to successfully attack other smart phone devices because it was successful on Apple Watch, which is considered as the most constrained device in the market. This result shows that the zero-permission application on a smart watch, if manipulated adequately, can transform into a high-threat malware.