ABSTRACT: Mobile devices are an integral part of our daily lives. But with their growing functionality and capability comes increased risk to personal privacy and security.  At a fundamental level, mobile devices are incredibly hard to secure.  In this talk, I will discuss some of the fundamental security and privacy risks in mobile devices. I will talk about our recent work in identifying and addressing the problem of “Sybil Devices,” software code that masquerades as mobile devices to manipulate and attack mobile apps from within. I will detail our study of this attack in the context of the Waze mapping/navigation application, and our experiences working with Google and news media to improve security and privacy for Waze users. Finally, I will summarize some of our other active research areas at UCSB SAND-Lab.

 

BIOGRAPHY: Ben Zhao is a Professor at the Computer Science department, U. C. Santa Barbara.  He completed his PhD from Berkeley and his BS from Yale. He is an ACM distinguished scientist, and recipient of the NSF CAREER award, MIT Technology Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), Computer World Magazine's Top 40 Tech Innovators award, Google Faculty award, and IEEE ITC Early Career Award. His work has been covered by edia outlets such as New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, MIT Tech Review, and Slashdot. He has published over 130 publications in areas of security and privacy, networked/distributed systems, wireless networks,  data-mining and HCI (H-index 56, 21000+ citations).