Shalini Kapoor

Securing Enterprise Data on Smartphones Using Run Time Information Flow Control

There is an increasing penetration of smart phones within enterprises. Most smart phone users now run both enterprise as well as personal applications simultaneously on their phones. However, most of the personal apps that are downloaded from public market places are hardly tested for enterprise grade security, and there have been instances of malware appearing in public markets that steal sensitive user information. Smart phone platforms such as Android require users to explicitly provide permissions to applications at install time, yet lack run time monitoring of permission usage by applications. In this paper, we present a framework for the run time enforcement of privacy policies on smart phones, in particular, protecting the privacy of enterprise data on smart phones. Our privacy policies are defined in terms of permissible information flows on the phone during different contexts. This arms users with finer grained control over information access by different applications. In our policy framework, an information flow is defined based on the entities involved in the corresponding inter-process communication(IPC) viz, the caller, callee and the associated IPC data. The information flow policy specifies the conditions under which an IPC flow may be permitted (or denied). Our system tracks information flows at run time and enforces that only flows satisfying all the current policies are permitted on the phone. We describe the design and implementation of our policy based framework in Android, and present performance evaluation results measuring the overhead imposed by our framework.

M4M: A model for enabling social network based sharing in the Internet of Things

The true potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) will be realized only when devices are able to harness the collective capabilities of a wide range of peer-devices. In this paper, we propose a novel model where friends in a social network can share device capabilities with their peers in an access controlled manner. We develop a theoretical model of such a peer-to-peer network in which devices can search for remote capabilities, and elaborate on the trade-offs of different algorithms in terms of capability searching and execution. We study various types of social network models to understand the degree of sharing in such networks. Our results show that Barabási-Albert graphs that approximate most real world social networks have a high degree of sharing, validating the utility of our social network based model. We also propose an algorithm that takes any given network and augments it to increase the level of sharing by intelligently suggesting friendship recommendations among vertices. Finally, we describe the prototype implementation of an android mobile application that uses facebook APIs to allow smartphones share GPS and camera capabilities with other devices owned by friends.

Reaching the Masses through a Rural Services Platform

Rural ICT initiatives undertaken so far have focused on device-level technologies that bring in a single service to the consumer. In this paper, we introduce the architecture and implementation of a Rural Services Platform which is not only a low cost shared model, but also brings in innovation in an end-to-end solution while touching the next billion population. The richness of interaction technologies used by a consumer or moderated by a facilitator for the consumer plays an important role in adoption of financial, advisory and business services by a rural populace. We describe our work in the context of social transfers by Government of India like NREGA payments and also present the architecture of a solution which can be used by 1) Business Correspondents who go into the remote villages to disburse payments 2) consumers directly, who can through a voice channel conduct their transactions of money transfers. Our solution can be used to provide an array of services across industries like banking, finance, agriculture, health-care and education to the end user, thereby not only reducing the cost of delivery, but also making the entire innovation scalable.

Polite: A policy framework for building managed mobile apps

The proliferation of smart phones inside enterprises and the number of enterprise apps (applications) available for various smart phone platforms has been increasing. This trend is expected to continue as smart phones tend to become the device of choice to access both enterprise and personal data. Making enterprise sensitive data accessible on smart phones requires that adequate protection mechanisms be available on these devices to ensure that sensitive data is not compromised due to various reasons, such as employees losing phones to malicious apps (installed by the user) running on the phones. Most of the existing solutions either provide device level control or have an external agent monitoring the applications behavior, and has numerous limitations. In this paper we propose a framework, Polite, to build enterprise mobile apps that can be managed at run-time, which is less intrusive to the end user while providing stronger security guarantees to the enterprise. We describe several critical scenarios where controlling the run time behavior of apps on the phone is essential and how our architecture can provide security guarantees that are not possible with existing solutions. Performance results of our implementation indicate that our framework induces a minimal overhead of only 6% that may be acceptable for most enterprise mobile apps.

HiCHO: Attributes Based Classification of Ubiquitous Devices

An online and incremental clustering method to classify heterogeneous devices in dynamic ubiquitous computing environment is presented. The proposed classification technique, HiCHO, is based on attributes characterizing devices. These can be logical and physical attributes. Such classification allows to derive class level similarity or dissimilarity between devices and further use it to extract semantic information about relationship among devices. The HiCHO technique is protocol neutral and can be integrated with any device discovery protocol. Detailed simulation analysis and real-world data validates the efficacy of the HiCHO technique and its algorithms.

Enhancing the Rural Self Help Group -- Bank Linkage Program

Self Help Groups (SHGs) are widely recognized as the hubs for information dissemination within villages and entry points for financial institutions as well as consumer goods organizations. However, in practice, operations within an SHG setting are often plagued by existence of highly illiterate population as well as difficulty of reach and connectivity. In this paper, we propose a system that uses voice as a medium to percolate knowledge through the thick layers of illiteracy and to overcome barriers of reach, thereby serving as an effective mechanism to bring about a paradigm shift in the way SHGs are formed, operate and interact with the Micro-finance Institution (MFI). This system enables low cost financial services to be comprehended and adopted by the SHGs while empowering them to raise concerns and undertake active participation. Our system is designed and realized using IBMs Spoken Web technology that employs an easy-to-use voice interface to create dynamic content in local vernacular language, based on the concept of ‘Voice Sites’, interconnected by ‘Voice Links’.

ICT Enabled Smart Rural Aggregation Platform

In the emerging markets like India, there is a clear need to provide accessibility of rural markets to multiple service providers and make multiple options available to rural consumers at affordable prices. In this paper, we analyze various requirements on such a platform that provide accessibility to rural people in emerging markets. The objective of the platform is to facilitate the emergence of a vibrant ecosystem of rural businesses, government agencies and non-profit organizations to offer various services, including collaboration, for the rural masses. We refer to this platform as a Smart Rural Aggregation Platform (SRAP). SRAP aims to have three key functionalities: 1) Allow businesses and service providers to register and expose their services, 2) Enable service consumers to access these services through multiple end points such as kiosks and mobile phones, and 3) Enable rural masses and service aggregators to channelize these services and facilitate collaboration between them.