Towards a Real-Time Anti-Theft Method for Mobile Devices Leveraging Acoustic Sensing

Chinese Journal of Computers (计算机学报) is the top-level journal in the field of computer science and engineering of China. This journal is also a T1 Chinese high-quality technical journal in computing domain.

The Chinese title of this paper is 基于声波感知的移动终端实时防窃方法研究.

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the gradual penetration and wide employment of mobile devices in people daily life and work. Due to the portability of mobile devices, they can be carried by users to any spaces, where are not always physically secure areas. Hence, mobile devices easily become the primary target of thieves. The theft of mobile devices not only leads to the direct economic loss, but also further induces the probable leakage of confidential information. Existing studies about mobile device protection concentrated on implementing the user authentication system to avoid the risk of confidential information leakage induced by the theft of mobile devices. However, such hysteretic protections cannot essentially prevent users’ mobile devices from theft. To provide the real-time protection for prevalent mobile devices, in this paper, we propose an acoustic-based mobile device anti-theft system, EchoScan, which employs the built-in sensors (including audio devices and motion sensors) to sense the context of mobile devices in real time so as to detect the theft. The core of the proposed system is to utilize acoustic sensing for real-time sensing and modeling the environment or state (i.e., the context) of mobile devices.

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