Improving transparency and end-user control in mobile. (Amélioration de la transparence et du contrôle par l'utilisateur dans les réseaux mobiles)

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming the primary device to access the Internet. Despite this thriving popularity, the current mobile ecosystem is largely opaque because of the vested monetary interests of its key players: mobile OS providers, creators of mobile applications, stores for mobile applications and media content, and ISPs. This problem of opaqueness is further aggravated by the limited control end-users have over the information exchanged by their mobile devices. To address this problem of opaqueness and lack of control, we designed a user-centric platform, Meddle, that uses traffic indirection to diagnose mobile devices. Compared to an on-device solution, Meddle uses two well-known technologies, VPNs and middleboxes, and combines them to provide a solution that is agnostic to OS, ISP, and access technology. We use Meddle for controlled experiments and an IRB approved study, and observed that popular iOS and Android applications leak personally identifiable information in the clear and also over SSL. We then use Meddle to prevent further leaks using a DNS based packet filter. We also use our platform to detail the network characteristics of video streaming services, the most popular Web-service in the current Internet. We observe that the network traffic characteristics vary vastly with the device (mobile or desktop), application (native applications and also between individual desktop browsers), and container (HTML5 and Flash). This observation is important because the increased adoption of one application or streaming service, for example, an increase in the usage of mobile devices to stream videos, could have a significant impact on the network traffic.