Collecting Sensor Data from Smart Devices

Project Description | How to participate| FAQ

Project Description

The object of this project is to gather sensor data like accelerometer and gyroscope readings from smart devices under different conditions. We plan to analyze the collected data to characterize the sensors embedded in different devices from a security and privacy point of view. Your participation is voluntary and fully anonymous, we therefore, request participants to participate sincerely. Although your participation in this research may not benefit you personally right now, it will help us understand to what degree users might be vulnerable to website fingerprinting and thus help us create public awareness.

To gather sensor data from smart devices we have developed a web page. So, participants only need to visit the web page and do not need to install any apps.

We are careful in not violating user privacy and are therefore not tracking any personal data. Our project went through IRB review and since we are not collecting any personal data of users IRB office has confirmed that we do not require any IRB approval. The official IRB letter is available here .

This experiment is leaded by Anupam Das, a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This project is being supervised by Professor Nikita Borisov (Hatswitch Group) and Professor Matt Caesar from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Feel free to contact us with any question or suggestion.

The tech report is available here.

How to participate

Participants need to fulfill two requirements:

  1. Use a smartphone or tablet (preferably a smartphone).
  2. Use the latest version of one of the following browsers- Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari. 

To participate please click the following link: Our data collection web page. 

A description of the different components of the webpage is give in the FAQ section.

To participate a user has to browse through our web pages in the following manner:

screen1 screen2 screen3 screen4 screen5 There are a total of 2 possible settings under which samples can be taken. We request participants to complete both settings.

FAQ (Frequently Anticipated Questions)

  1. What do the buttons on the web pages do?
  2. How long will this take?
  3. What kind of browser and OS versions are supported?
  4. How much bandwidth is used for uploading data?
  5. Where is the data stored?
  6. What is being measured and why?
What do the buttons on the web pages do?
  1. First web page: Select how the phone is placed for the data collection session.
    • Proceed: Only when the device is on top of a flat surface should users proceed to the next step.
    • Go to instruction page: Forwards the user to this page.

  2. The second web page: Provides options for selecting an experimental setting.
    • Raw Data: Simply collects raw sensor readings. Provides us with base line measurement.
    • Sine Wave (20 kHz): Plays a pure 20 kHz Sine wave while collecting sensor readings.
    • Go to instruction page: Forwards the user to this page
    Note: Once you select one of the buttons, both buttons become disabled until 10 samples have been taken.

At any given point the user could refresh the webpage, however, this will remove any previously stored states like the number of samples already taken out of 10. 

How long will this take?
Each sample takes about ~6 seconds. So, for a given setting 10 samples would require ~1 minute. For the two settings it would require a total of ~2 minutes.
What kind of browser and OS versions are supported?
Our data collection process requires participants to use one of the following browsers-
  1. Chrome 
  2. Opera
  3. Firefox (though you may run to some issues in Firefox) 
  4. Safari
The default Android Browser will not provide all the APIs that we need, we therefore, ask participants to install one of the above browsers.
Also for any Android device the OS version should be >=4.0 and for any Apple product it should be at least iOS 4.0.
How much bandwidth is used for uploading data?
Each sample file is about 30-80 KBs in size. So, 10 samples would upload a maximum of 800 KB. And the two possible combination would require at most ~1.5 MBs of upload.
Where is the data stored?
Sensor readings are sent out to the following server- datarepo.cs.illinois.edu situated inside the UoI campus. We plan to make the data public to other researchers in future.
What is being measured and why?
We are measuring the sensor values under different settings. We hope to the analyze the sensor data to uniquely characterize different sensors. Such characterization would be useful from both security (are you using the right device) and privacy (what information is being leaked) point of view.