6thSense primarily works by identifying harmful activity on your smartphone. It monitors the phone's sensor activity and alerts the user when it detects unusual behaviors that deviate from the learned normal activities of the user, allowing users to identify potential malicious actions or apps.
Sensor safeguards
It’s getting ever easier for an untrustworthy party to figure out private details of your life from data they get from your phone’s sensors. So researchers are devising ways to give people more control over what information apps can siphon data from their devices.
Some safeguard apps could appear as standalone programs. Others are tools that would be built into future updates of the operating system for your phone’s onboard computer.
Uluagac and his colleagues recently proposed a system called 6thSense. It monitors a phone’s sensor activity. Then it alerts an owner when it detects unusual behaviors. Users train this system to recognize their phone’s normal sensor behavior. This might include tasks like calling, Web browsing or driving. Then, 6thSense continually checks the phone’s sensor activity against these learned behaviors.
That program is on the lookout for something odd. This might be the motion sensors reaping data when a user is just sitting and texting. Then, 6thSense alerts the user. Users can check if a recently downloaded app is responsible for a suspicious activity. If so, they can delete the app from their phones.
Uluagac’s team recently tested a prototype of 6thSense on Samsung smartphones. The owners of 50 of these phones trained with 6thSense to identify their typical sensor activity. The researchers then fed the 6thSense system examples of benign data from daily activities mixed with bits of malicious sensor operations. 6thSense correctly picked out the problematic bits more than 96 percent of the time. How does 6thSense work?
It disables all unnecessary sensors on your smartphone.
It identifies harmful activity on your smartphone.
It blocks other parties' attempts to access your smartphone.
It dulls the sensitivity and precision of sensors on your smartphone.
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