Privacy and IoT Research Exploration Workshop 2
Summer 2022: For Undergraduate Students
Monday June 20, 2022 – Friday July 1, 2022, 9:00am-3pm ISEB 1310
Overview
Our Privacy and IoT Research Exploration Workshop 2 is the second in a series of workshops that aims to offer undergraduate students hands-on and research experiences in the areas of Privacy and IoT, as well as to offer career development opportunities.
It builds on outreach activities realized by ProperData and UCI’s Office of Access and Inclusion. Last year our exploreCSR IoT and Privacy workshop, was supported by Google, ran virtually in May, and admitted 60 undergraduates from across center institutions and California community colleges. A UCI SSoE article about the 2021 program and experience can be found here.
For summer 2022, we offered an expanded ten-day in-person program at the UCI campus, in order to promote deeper immersion and hands-on experience. 18 undergraduates were selected and offered the option to stay on-campus or commute. Participants were typically from underrepresented and marginalized groups within STEM fields and from UCI, UC Davis, USC, and Northeastern, as well as several community colleges in Southern California.
The program offered the following types of experiences:
- Hands-on experience with raspberry-Pi, tinyML, networking and network traffic collection and analysis, IoT in general and voice assistants in particular.
- Privacy tutorials and cutting-edge research experiences from ProperData researchers.
- A deeper exploration of voice assistants. Participants built their own voice-assistant from scratch, and became familiar with the privacy and targeting risks posed by commercial voice assistants.
- Career development opportunities including: workshops on undergraduate research opportunities, graduate school, public speaking, etc; networking and mentoring with the ProperData team; panels featuring graduate students, faculty and industry professionals; visits from and to local industry.
Read a UCI Samueli School of Engineering recap article of our 2022 program here.
Summary of Technical Program
The overall goal of the technical part of our program was for students to understand how voice assistants are used for tracking and targeting and the privacy issues related to smart speakers. Along the way, we offered hands-on tutorials on raspberry Pi programming, network traffic monitoring, and web crawling.
In the first part of the project, students developed their own virtual assistants with privacy of data in mind. We used a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and installed the Mycroft operating system to help us achieve this task. Mycroft is the first assistant that embraces the concept of user agency. By default, Mycroft does not store queries or other sensitive data. Each Mycroft can run anywhere – at home on a monitor, by itself like an Alexa, or even inside an automobile. It is open source, so it can be remixed, extended, or improved. Each student installed unique skills on each device in the way that Alexa has skills. Data was recorded to see if the data of our devices was truly protected.
In the second part of the project, we focused on privacy issues in commercial smart speakers. Exercises included leaking data with automated interactions, measuring the collection of leaked data, and inferring the usage of the data in the wild.
- For leaking data, we introduced students to the basics of automated web crawling and voice interactions. This part included exercises to automatically interact with web pages, collect website content, train web personas, convert text to speech, speech to text, and record the audio in an environment.
- For measuring the collection of leaked data, we introduced students to the basics of collecting and analyzing network traffic. This part included exercise to intercept traffic on the router, develop heuristics to detect non-essential requests, and develop heuristics to detect leaked data types.
- For inferring the usage of leaked data, we introduced students to basics of statistical analysis and graph visualizations. This included exercises to measure statistical significance and present the results of statistical analysis in figures and graphs.
Program Poster available here.
Logistics
Workshop Location
Workshop programming will take place at UCI’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB), Room 1310. ISEB is Building 419 in quadrant F-5 on the campus map.
University Housing
Accepted students who do not reside near UCI will be housed at UCI’s Middle Earth Residential Hall during the program. Middle Earth is found in quadrant E-7 on the campus map.
Parking for Workshop 2
We recommend parking at Lot 16H or Anteater Parking Structure for visiting guests and commuter students. Guests and non-UCI commuter students can purchase a general visitor parking pass. UCI commuter students can purchase a student parking permit.
Important for guests and commuting students: Guests and commuter students may park in any general unmarked spot in designated visitor parking lots. Spots are at times marked with parking signs and not physically painted, please be aware of all signs in lots.
Important for Residents: If you are bringing a vehicle to campus, please be sure to purchase an overnight parking pass, you must have a valid parking pass at all times.
Lot 16H is in quadrant G4 on the campus map. Lot 16h only has a permit dispenser.
Anteater Parking Structure is in quadrant E7 on the campus map and has an attendant at the kiosk (kiosk located through Anteater Drive Entrance).