The Machines That Betrayed Their Masters Slides from talk
Fascinating talk on how anyone could conduct mass surveillance over a whole city, using the Snoopy Framework (distributed tracking and profiling framework)
Potential Use
What could be done with Snoopy? There are likely legal, borderline, and illegal activities. Such is the case with any technology.
Legal -Collecting anonymized statistics on thoroughfare. For example, Transport for London could deploy these devices at every London underground to get statistics on peak human traffic. This would allow them to deploy more staff, or open more pathways, etc. Such data over the period of months and years would likely be of use for future planning. -Penetration testers targeting clients to demonstrate the WiFi threat.
Borderline -This type of technology could likely appeal to advertisers. For example, a reseller of a certain brand of jeans may note that persons who prefer certain technologies (e.g. Apple) frequent certain locations. -Companies could deploy Drones in one of each of their establishments (supermarkets, nightclubs, etc) to monitor user preference. E.g. a observing a migration of customers from one establishment to another after the deployment of certain incentives (e.g. promotions, new layout). -Imagine the Government deploying hundreds of Drones all over a city, and then having field agents with mobile Drones in their pockets. This could be a novel way to track down or follow criminals. The other side of the coin of course being that they track all of us…
Illegal -Let’s pretend we want to target David Beckham. We could attend several public events at which David is attending (Drone in pocket), ensuring we are within reasonable proximity to him. We would then look for overlap of commonly observed devices over time at all of these functions. Once we get down to one device observed via this intersection, we could assume the device belongs to David. Perhaps at this point we could bring up a rogue access point that only targets his device, and proceed maliciously from there. Or just satisfy ourselves by geolocating places he frequents. -Botnet infections, malware distribution. That doesn’t sound very nice. Snoopy drones could be used to infect users’ devices, either by injection malicious web traffic, or firing exploits from the Snoopy server at devices. -Unsolicited advertising. Imagine browsing the web, and an unscrupulous 3rd party injects viagra adverts at the top of every visited page?
How exactly does SAFEnetwork mitigate a Snoopy Network?
It seems the OS itself becomes very important ie SAFEOS on all connected devices, included ‘internet of things’ boy, that’s a lot of work
