Context-Dependent Privacy and Security Management on Mobile Devices

Prajit Das, UMBC

10:00am Tuesday, 27 February, 2017

Security and privacy of mobile devices is a challenging research domain. A prominent aspect of this research focuses on discovering software vulnerabilities for mobile operating systems and mobile apps. The other aspect of research focuses on user privacy and using feedback, generates privacy profiles for controlling data privacy. Profile based or role-based security can be restrictive as they require prior definition of such roles or profiles. As a result, it is better to use attribute-based access control and let the attributes define granularity of policy definition. This problem may thus be defined as, a security and privacy personalization problem. A critical issue in the process of capturing personalized policy is one of creating a system that is adaptive and knows when user’s preferences have been captured. Presented in this work you will learn about Mithril, a framework for capturing user access control policies that are fine-grained, context-sensitive and are represented using Semantic Web technologies and thereby manages access control decisions for user data on mobile devices. Violation metric has been used in this work as a measure to determine system state. A hierarchical context ontology has been used to define fine-grained access control policies and simplifying the process of policy modification for a user. A secondary goal of this research was to determine behavioral traits of mobile applications with a goal to detect outlier applications. Some preliminary research on this topic will also be discussed.