AT&T Labs Research - AT&T Research at MobiSys 2011

AT&T Research at MobiSys 2011

Jun 28 - Jul 01, 2011

Washington, DC,

Contact: Ramón Cáceres

Demo Session:

June 29, 2011 at 05:30 PM

Demo: Mobile Application Resource Optimizer (ARO)
Feng Qian, Zhaoguang Wang, Alexandre Gerber, Z. Morley Mao, Subhabrata Sen, Oliver Spatscheck
in Proc. of ACM MobiSys, 2011. [PDF] [BIB]

ACM Copyright

(c) ACM, 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proc. of ACM MobiSys , 2011-06-27.

Session: When and Where:

June 30, 2011 at 11:45 AM

AccuLoc: Practical Localization of Performance Measurements in 3G Networks
Qiang Xu, Alexandre Gerber, Z. Morley Mao, Jeffrey Pang
in Proc. of ACM MobiSys, 2011. [PDF] [BIB]

ACM Copyright

{Operators of 3G data networks need to distinguish the performance of each geographic area in their 3G networks to detect and resolve localized network problems. This is because the quality of the �last mile� radio link between 3G base stations and end-user devices is a crucial factor in the end-to-end performance that each user experiences. It is relatively straightforward to measure the performance of all IP traffic in the 3G network from a small number of vantage points in the core network. However, the location information available about each mobile device (e.g., the cell sector that it is in) is often too stale to be accurate because of user mobility. Moreover, it is impractical to collect fine grained location information about all mobile devices on an on-going basis in large 3G networks. Thus, it is not practical to accurately assign IP performance measurements to fine-grained geographic regions of the 3G network using off the- shelf components. Fortunately, previous studies have observed that human mobility patterns are very predictable. In this paper, we exploit this predictability to develop a novel clustering algorithm that accurately assigns IP performance measurements to fine-grained geographic regions. At the GGSNs, we can either localize a subscriber into only 4 cell sectors with the accuracy of 70% over 5 consecutive days based on a one-day snapshot of fine-grained 3GPP events, or increase the accuracy 20% through lightweight handover statistics hourly collected. We present results from a prototype in a real 3G network that shows our clustering provides more accurate performance localization results than existing approaches. Our results also shed light on the mobility patterns of 3G devices.}

Session: Security and Privacy:

June 30, 2011 at 02:00 PM

Security versus Energy Tradeoffs in Host-Based Mobile Malware Detection
Horacio Lagar , Alexander Varshavsky, Jeffrey Bickford, Vinod Ganapathy, Liviu Iftode
ACM Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), 2011. [PDF] [BIB]

ACM Copyright

{The rapid growth of mobile malware necessitates the presence of robust malware detectors on mobile devices. However, running malware detectors on mobile devices may drain their battery, causing users to disable these protection mechanisms to save power. This paper studies the security versus energy tradeoffs for a particularly challenging class of malware detectors, namely rootkit detectors. Specifically, we investigate the security/energy tradeoffs along two axes: attack surface and malware scanning frequency, for both code and data based rootkit detectors. Our findings, based on a real implementation on a phone-like device, reveal that protecting against code-driven attacks is relatively cheap, while protecting against all data-driven attacks is prohibitively expensive. Based on our findings, we determine a sweet spot in the security/energy tradeoff, called the balanced profile, which protects a mobile device against a vast majority of attacks, while consuming limited amount of extra battery power. }

June 30, 2011 at 02:00 PM

ProxiMate: Proximity-based Secure Pairing using Ambient Wireless Signals
Suhas Mathur, Rob Miller, Alexander Varshavsky, Wade Trappe, Narayan Mandayam
MobiSys 2011, 2011. [PDF] [BIB]

ACM Copyright

Forming secure associations between wireless devices that do not share a prior trust relationship is an important problem. This paper presents ProxiMate, an algorithm that allows wireless devices in proximity to securely pair with one another autonomously by generating a common cryptographic key directly from their shared time-varying wireless environment. The shared key synthesized by ProxiMate can be used by the devices to authenticate each others' physical proximity and then to communicate confidentially. Unlike traditional pairing approaches such as Diffie-Hellman, ProxiMate is secure against a computationally unbounded adversary and its computational complexity is linear in the size of the key. We evaluate ProxiMate using an experimental prototype built using an open-source software-defined platform and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating common secret bits. We further show that it is possible to speed up secret key synthesis by monitoring multiple RF sources simultaneously or by shaking together the devices that need to be paired. Finally, we show that ProxiMate is resistant to even the most powerful attacker who controls the public RF source used by legitimate devices for pairing.

Session: Tracking and Saving Energy:

July 1, 2011 at 10:45 AM

Profiling Resource Usage for Mobile Applications: A Cross-layer Approach
Feng Qian, Zhaoguang Wang, Alexandre Gerber, Z. Morley Mao, Subhabrata Sen, Oliver Spatscheck
in Proc. of ACM MobiSys, 2011. [PDF] [BIB]

ACM Copyright

{Despite the popularity of mobile applications, their performance and energy bottlenecks remain hidden due to a lack of visibility into the resource-constrained mobile execution environment with po- tentially complex interaction with the application behavior. We de- sign and implement ARO, the mobile Application ResourceOptimizer, the first tool that efficiently and accurately exposes the cross-layer interaction among various layers including radio resource chan- nel state, transport layer, application layer, and the user interac- tion layer to enable the discovery of inefficient resource usage for smartphone applications. To realize this, ARO provides three key novel analyses: (i) accurate inference of lower-layer radio resource control states, (ii) quantification of the resource impact of applica- tion traffic patterns, and (iii) detection of energy and radio resource bottlenecks by jointly analyzing cross-layer information. We have implemented ARO and demonstrated its benefit on several essential categories of popular Android applications to detect radio resource and energy inefficiencies, such as unacceptably high (46%) energy overhead of periodic audience measurements and inefficient con- tent prefetching behavior.}

Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services:
Arati Baliga, Xu Chen, Baris Coskun, Gustavo De los reyes, Seungjoon Lee, Suhas Mathur, Jacobus van der Merwe

VPMN – Virtual Private Mobile Network Towards Mobility-as-a-Service

June 28, 2011 at 10:30 AM

language system networks speech transmission speaker communication traffic routing network conference data spoken control slides network data packet dialog fiber video networks service systems internet optical analysis photo systems services services multiple information performance language preview access wireless multi

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