Privacy, location and mobile sensor-based applications
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Abstract
Pre-requisite: the course on Computer Security. Ideally, you will also make a link to some other course that you have studied as part of the taught part of the degree.In addition you should have good programming skills, and preferably some experience of web-based applications.
Mobile applications are now capable of using a wide range of sensors and local information. This includes location data, light levels, orientation, velocity and other contextual information. These enable various clever use cases and new functionality. However, with extra information comes the potential for privacy violation.
The MSc project would be to develop a novel mobile web application that can enhance the privacy of the person using it. This would be developed as part of the larger EU "webinos" project, which is currently being researched in the department. webinos is a cross-device application runtime for mobile devices, cars, media centres and computers. It aims to provide a standard set of javascript APIs for web applications, as well as providing access to context information about the end user and their activities. The privacy-enhancing web application could be something along the lines of:
A system for observing interactions with other users and devices, and subsequently analysing which parties can infer what information about the user A "forget that happened" application to erase a certain event from a device history, as well as identifying where, when and to who information about the event might have been sent.
The major research results of this project would be the application, as well as related evidence (either program language based proofs, information flow analysis or experiments) to show its effectiveness.