Of Mobile Devices: a Survey on Network Traffic Analysis
1 The Dark Side(-Channel) of Mobile Devices: A Survey on Network Traffic Analysis Mauro Conti, Senior Member, IEEE, QianQian Li, Alberto Maragno, and Riccardo Spolaor*, Member, IEEE. Abstract—In recent years, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones elements enable both smartphones and tablets to have the and tablets) have met an increasing commercial success and same functionalities typically offered by laptops and desktop have become a fundamental element of the everyday life for computers. billions of people all around the world. Mobile devices are used not only for traditional communication activities (e.g., voice According to the statistics reported in [1], smartphone calls and messages) but also for more advanced tasks made users were 25:3% of the global population in 2015, and this possible by an enormous amount of multi-purpose applications percentage is expected to grow till 37% in 2020. Similarly, the (e.g., finance, gaming, and shopping). As a result, those devices statistics about tablets reported in [2] indicate a global penetra- generate a significant network traffic (a consistent part of the overall Internet traffic). For this reason, the research community tion of 13:8% in 2015, expected to reach 19:2% in 2020. The has been investigating security and privacy issues that are related driving forces of this tremendous success are the ubiquitous to the network traffic generated by mobile devices, which could Internet connectivity, thanks to the worldwide deployment of be analyzed to obtain information useful for a variety of goals cellular and Wi-Fi networks, and a large number of apps (ranging from fine-grained user profiling to device security and available in the official (and unofficial) marketplaces.
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