Reactive Security: Responding to Visual Stimuli from Wearable Cameras

Abstract: Consumer electronic devices like smartphones increasingly feature arrays of sensors that can `see', `hear', and `feel' the environment around them. While these devices began with primitive capabilities, newer generations of electronics offer sophisticated sensing arrays that collect high-fidelity representations of the physical world. For example, wearable cameras are becoming more prevalent with new consumer lifelogging products including the Narrative Clip, Autographer, and Google Glass. These wearable cameras give computing devices a persistent sense of sight, raising important concerns about protecting people's privacy. At the same time, these devices also provide opportunities for enhancing security, by allowing trusted devices to observe and react to the physical environment surrounding the user and the device. We propose Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) to mediate access to sensors and their data using attributes of the context and content of sensor information. Attributes extracted from sensor data could be used to trigger policy actions ranging from sharing or not sharing images, to invoking system changes in reaction to outside visual stimuli such as automatically shutting down network interfaces when in the presence of unknown people. While prior work has addressed some specific actions, like preventing potentially private images from being shared based on their location, in this paper we present and advocate for a more general working definition of ABAC that applies to sensors and sensor data. We also present use cases for how this reactive security approach may help protect the privacy and security of users.