Smartphone communication using magnetic fields

In a recent paper we published at Ubicomp 2014 we demonstrate how magnetic fields can be used for communication purposes on smartphones. Specifically, we show how a phone’s magnetometer can be used to capture and decode information that is implicitly encoded in a magnetic field. In this article we provide a high-level description of how our system (Pulse) works. You…

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Understanding Mobile Privacy and Security Concerns

Motivation Smartphone users are unable to preemptively identify potential mobile application malware. We developed Securacy, a mobile application that: crowdsources users’ concerns of application’s security and privacy (i.e., securacy); informs the users of potential risks; reveals hidden application network connections to servers; and pinpoints the applications’ servers location. We propose an alternative for handling permissions and abstract them as user’s…

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