Abstract

As a society we have come to rely upon our mobile phones for myriad daily tasks. It is striking how little insight we, as mobile users and researchers, have into the operation and performance of our devices and network, into how (or whether) mobile apps protect the information we entrust to them, and with whom they share it. The research community (including the speaker) have energetically used a variety of approaches to gain empirical understanding of the mobile device/network ecosystem; however, these techniques have had to make trade-offs that affect either the scale, scope or granularity of measurements.

This talk describes how we leverage ideas from this prior work to design and develop the Lumen Privacy Monitor. The talk will demonstrate its utility to researchers and average users alike by providing case studies on mobile traffic characterization, identification of privacy risks inflicted by mobile apps, and perform network performance measurements.

Bio

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez is an Assistant Research Professor at IMDEA Networks and a research scientist at the Networking and Security team at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. Narseo received his degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Oviedo in 2007, which he extended with a 6-month visit at the University of Cambridge to complete his degree dissertation. In 2008, Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez joined Vodafone R&D, returning to the University of Cambridge to complete his Ph.D. program under the supervision of Prof. Jon Crowcroft one year after. In July 2013, Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez joined ICSI in Berkeley (California) as a Post-Doc, becoming a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator one year after. During his doctoral studies Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez also interned in world-class industry research labs, such as Deutsche Telekom Labs in Berlin (Germany) and the scientific group at Telefonica Research (Spain). The outcome of his research has been awarded with a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in 2012, the best short-paper award at ACM CoNEXT'14, the best paper award at ACM HotMiddlebox'15 and a DataTransparencyLabs grant in 2016 for characterizing mobile tracking services with the Lumen Privacy Monitor.