Project definition & scope Introduction Background/description of context/need/b
ID: 3860817 • Letter: P
Question
Project definition & scope Introduction Background/description of context/need/benefits Explain the context of the project, why it's needed, where appropriate, the intended audience for the final project product and project stakeholders Include some initial research as appropriate. Outline the project benefits for you personally, your client where relevant and in the broader IT context. Aim/s & objectives Scope Include what's in scope: out of scope: assumptions, constraints Describe the boundaries of your project and any assumptions you are making regarding your projectExplanation / Answer
Privacy Issue around Wearable devices
Project Definition and Scope:
Wearable devices also called wearable gadget, is category of technology devices with low processing capabilities that can be worn by a user with the aim to provide information and ease of access to the master devices its pairing with. Such examples are Google Glass and Smart watch.
The impact of wearable devices becomes significant when people start their invention in wearable computing, where their mobile devices become one of the computation sources. However, wearable devices are not mature yet in term of device security and privacy acceptance of the public. There exists some security weakness that prompts such wearable devices vulnerable to attack.
One of the critical attacks on wearable devices is authentication issue. The low processing due to less computing power of wearable device cause the developer's inability to equip some complicated security mechanisms and algorithm on the device. In this study, an overview of security and privacy vulnerabilities on wearable devices is presented.
Introduction:
Wearable Devices (WD), or called as wearable is a computing technology device that can be worn on the human body, either a computer that are incorporated as an accessory or as part of material used in clothing
WD offers new opportunities to monitor human activity continuously with the miniature wearable sensors embedded. It improves efficiency, productivity, service and engagement across industries. However, there are few challenges faced on WD which are power consumption, communication capacity, design constraints, and security issue. Due to limited bandwidth and processing power, wearable’s provide less security compared to other computing devices. In the consequences, the possibilities for the security vulnerabilities exploited increases to an array of possible attacks which will put users’ safety and privacy appear at risk. Wearable computing brings new challenges and opportunities for user authentication
One main challenge in adopting a good approach to a secure authentication in wearable is due to the nature of its operations in which wearable devices are not standalone devices as they will require pairing with other gadget such as Smartphone to perform most functions. This complexity of communication creates security vulnerabilities such as man-in-the-middle attack. Imagine a user who uses his smart watch to control his smart home. The need for a communication between the smart watch and the application which is stored within the Smartphone is prone to information leakage leading to other security attacks through the art of manipulation of data. The other challenge is the lack a keyboard, and often times even a touch screen cause’s difficulty in providing authentication mechanism.
The work present an aim to present a brief review on security and privacy attacks that occur in wearable technology to understand its security and privacy loophole that exists in wearable technology and present a security analysis on various wearable technology devices. A security analysis is done by evaluating three main wearable devices such as Google Glass, Fit bit and Smart watch. The outline of the paper is as the following. Section II provides some related work. Section III demonstrates a comprehensive security and privacy. Section IV presents the discussion and conclusion
RELATED WORK
Wearable Device is the latest technology in the electronic devices field. It has been designed in many different forms that can be worn on the human body from head to toe such as glasses, shirt, wristband, watches and other forms.
It not only can perform the basic task like what smart phones do, but the embedded, wearable sensors also recognize and provide wearer’s actionable information in a real time context. Wearable device has the following characteristics such as
• Hands-free (unrestrictive), so that users can do other thing when using the wearables.
• always on (controllable), it is a responsive system as it is always in the ON status, so users can grab control of it at any time.
• Environment-aware (attentive), wearables are environmentally aware, multimodal and multisensory.
• attention-getting (observable), it can keep users continuous attention when users want it to such as receiving alerts, messages or reminders.
• connected (communicative), the wearables are connected to a wireless network so that information exchange can be happened in the real-time situation.
• UN monopolizing, which mean it does not cut users off from the outside world.
WEARABLE DEVICES SENSORS EXAMPLES
Wearable sensors are often combined with the other sensors to detect human activities of daily living (ADL) such as walking, running, sitting and eating. There are many possible applications for activity recognition with wearable sensors, for instance in the areas of healthcare, elderly care, personal fitness, entertainment, or performing arts. Different sensors are deployed on wearable devices depending on what kind of activity monitoring information to be collected. Accelerometer is used to measure linear acceleration. It is measured in three axis to measure position in three dimensions. The accelerometer embedded inside wearable can determine whether the device is horizontal or vertical and whether it’s moving or not. The basic function of an accelerometer in wearable is to count steps on people’s activities such as walking. Gyroscope determines the orientation by using Earth's gravity based on principle of rotation. Both accelerometer and gyroscope are IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensors that are commonly used in wearables. Both of them can determine orientation, but the gyroscope provides greater precision and it gives measurements for angular velocity. More importantly, they are implemented in vary applications despite their similar purpose. GPS (Global Positioning System) is a location sensor that is widely used for navigation. Most wearable’s now include an integrated GPS tracking system to
Locate a person’s location. It detects the location using either GPS, triangulation of cell towers or Wi-Fi networks with a database of known location .A microphone is defined as acoustic sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. Most wearables are embedded with this sensor for voice activity detection. Next an analysis on various wearable devices such as Google Glass and Fit bit devices
SECURITY ANALYSIS ON REAL EXAMPLES OF WERABLE DEVICES
Google Glass or simply called as Glass can say as the first wearable device that kick start the growth of WT. Glass is an eyewear device that has built-in computer in the frame of a pair of glasses. It provides numerous innovative features that make people life more fun. However, many concerns have been raised from various sources regarding to some issues that could be threatened wearer’s security and privacy. There are few research findings that point out some vulnerability in term of security and privacy aspect on Google Glass. For example, Glass does not have a secure enough PIN system or authentication in place currently. Besides authentication issues, found that the privacy of user’ appears at risk as well by the eye tracking technology supported in Glass. In addition, Seyedmostafa and Zarina revealed that pictures and videos can be recorded without user’s consent which violate people privacy policy. More importantly, there are several real cases regarding security vulnerability associated with Glass were reported at the time of Google release. For example, engineers at the security firm Lookout Mobile revealed serious security vulnerability on how Glass interprets QR (Quick Response) codes while it snaps a photo back in May 2013. They found that Glass would scan a malicious QR code that forced it to be connected to a hostile wifi access point and someone could remotely gain root access to a Glass device and take control of it without the wearer’s knowledge. Fortunately, the bug has been reported to Google and a patch was released to fix the problem in a timely manner. However, a few months later, Symantec reported that Glass is still vulnerable to Wi-Fi Hijacking despite QR photo bombing. This happened because someone can set up a Wi-Fi access point using the same Wi-Fi name as the one that people previously use to connect before using a device called Wi-Fi Pineapple. It can impersonate any network that a device searches for by borrowing the network SSID (Service Set Identifier). For example, when Glass checks to see if that prior network is available the attacker’s Wi-Fi Pineapple will simply answer the request and pretend to be that specific network. It causes Glass to be at risk with the same sort of attacks that can arise when connecting to a hostile network such as sniffing traffic or redirection to malicious sites. Lastly, wearable technology raises the issues of privacy as described in , ninety percent of the survey target feel uncomfortable if someone recording a video of them using Google Glass. The feature and functionality of any wearable device allow user to capture images or record video using their wearable device without the notice of their target. Some entertainment place like cinema and casino has even banned the usage of such devices in their business area due to the privacy problem. In this case, we may conclude that the level of acceptance of people with certain wearable devices is low due to the fact that such device affects people’s perception of their privacy.
FITBIT DEVICES
Fitbit is known for its products which is a smart fitness band that can be worn on the wrist. It provides human activity measurement such as number of steps walked; sleep quality and other personal health metrics like heart-rate and body temperature.However, one of the major security vulnerabilities found in Fitbit is lack of authentication. Presented that Fitbit is lack of authentication on tracker side and potential attacker can easily get the data from without the knowledge of users. For instance, Mahmudur et.al built a tool, FitBite to launch several attacks on Fitbit devices such as data injection attack, DoS and battery drain hacks to prove the statement. The result showed that the vulnerable Fitbit device could allow malicious hackers to hijack Fitbit users’ account, access or even manipulate their personal health data to earn monetary rewards.In addition; Fit bit Flex is vulnerable due to leaky BTLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) technology. This is because it did not change the privacy address or MAC address remains the same and it can be easily tracked based on the Fit bit’s Bluetooth advertisement. In consequences, it could lead to privacy breach as third parties can track activities for specific users. Insurance companies may also take this advantage to create a “gray market” for getting users' health information data. Besides that, Fitbit devices could potentially threaten users’ privacy risk. For example, it allows malicious people to track users location or places visited to make phishing attack such as send fake email that offer deals with the link that actually linked to spyware or a virus .
WEARABLE DEVICES (WD) CHALLENGES: SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES
There are a few key challenges faces in WD which are power consumption, communication capacity, design constraints, and security and privacy issues. Furthermore, the major challenge in WD which is the security issues is highlighted as it is the focus of this research study. It can be further categorized into three major parts which are security vulnerabilities, attacks and security
solutions. The security vulnerabilities in WD can be exploited by an array of possible security and privacy attacks. The security attacks can be further divided according to two main types: passive attack and active attack. Passive attacks try to get the user’s password and sensitive information without breaking and affect the system while active attacks contrast with passive attacks, in which try to break and alter the system. When the security vulnerability is exploited, there will be a loss. The loss can be loss in term of Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability or Authenticity. On the other hands, privacy attacks are categorized by user identity and data integrity attacks and time and location based attacks. The security solutions can mainly be discussed using two different terms which are authentication and encryption. Authentication can be further divided into two main types which are single-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication. There are several common challenges identified in the wearable technology that will need to be addressed by further researchers in order to improve it which include:
Power consumption. One of the major challenges is the high power consumption of wearable devices. The battery power of wearable devices can only last for one to two days since most devices use wireless networks, GPS, and other technologies that consume a lot of power. Hence, short battery life and high power consumption of wearable devices will cause people reducing the usage and adoption.
• Communication capacity. The communication range is limited, which mean that the covered area range of wireless transmissions is usually limited because of both technological and energy-savings considerations.
• Design constraints. Some wearables are designed in bulky size and it does not really make users feel comfortable to it such as “Holter-type” system.
• Security issues. Security, privacy is still an unresolved issue in WT. The wearable devices contain a lot of user’s data which putting users’ security and privacy on the risk. Moreover, it also may consist of sensitive information data such as address, credit card number, and health-related data. Therefore, security issues will be the key challenges for WT to be adopted widely in the market.
WEARABLEDEVICE (WD) SECURITY VULNERABILITIES
Security and privacy issues could be the major reasons of it. It can lead to the serious breach and loss if the security vulnerability is not handled properly. The loss could be either static assets such as files, documents or dynamic asset like credit card number. At the end, it will cause data and financial loss or even safety issues. Furthermore, user’s trustworthiness towards wearable will decrease and discourage people to get their own wearable. For instance, among the top consumer concerns about the IoT, which is defined as devices that connect with each other or to the Internet—28% of respondent's concern about “or someone hacking into the device and doing something malicious” and 26% concern about “not knowing how the information collected by the devices will be used” [28]. This implies that security issues are the major concerns that potentially reduce user acceptance and trustworthiness towards devices. Therefore, it is important to investigate on the security vulnerability on the devices for user protection.
CONCLUSION
As the IoT market advances, WD is growing in popularity for their convenience and capabilities. WT offers better functionalities by providing real time data communication, but also poses a greater security and privacy risks. This two major challenges would be the obstacles for WT to be adopted widely in the market. People are concerned about the security of the wearable as the data collected might consist sensitive information about themselves and their surroundings such as identity, health-related information, credit card number, and the location. Although this advance technology does benefit people but there are still some security loophole and privacy issues that required extra attention and effort of designer in designing wearable technology model. In this paper, some background study on security and privacy revolving wearable device is presented. A security vulnerability analysis for real-example is also presented. Overall, one major attack that occurs is authentication issue. Thus, in the future, more study in authentication will be done and a more better authentication mechanism will be presented.
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