Description: AntMonitor is mobile software that runs on the mobile device, and passively monitors all packets in and out of the network interface. We designed AntMonitor as a VPN-based service, and we developed and compared two versions of the architecture: Client-Server and Mobile-Only. We demonstrated the lean performance of the AntMonitor Mobile-Only prototype, in terms of throughput and energy, and compared it to the Client-Server one, as well as other state-of-the-art VPN-based approaches. AntMonitor can be used as a tool to support a number of passive monitoring applications, including: real-time detection and prevention of private information leakage from the device to the network; application classification; ad blocking, and network performance measurements.
Point of Contact: please contact the PI, A. Markopoulou, or antmonitor.uci@gmail.com
Funding
Acknowledgements: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under
- Grant No.1649372 “EAGER: A New Framework for Mobile Network Monitoring, Learning and Control”, Oct.1, 2016- Sept. 30, 2019.
- Grant No 1228995: “Crowdsourcing for Global Software Integrity”, Oct.1, 2012-Sept. 30-2016.
Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
It has also been supported by a gift from the Data Transparency Lab, 2016:
Team
- PI: Athina Markopoulou, EECS Dept.
- Evita Bakopoulou, PhD student, Networked Systems
- Emmanouil Alimpertis, grad student, Networked Systems
Past members:
- Anastasia Shuba, PhD Thesis “Mobile Data Transparency and Control” (2019), EECS Dept.; currently with Broadcom Inc.
- Milad Asgari Mehradabi, MS Thesis “A Recommendation System for Predicting Privacy Leaks in Mobile Traffic” (2019) EECS Dept.
- Nivedhita Sathyamurthy, MS Thesis, EECS Dept.; currently with Facebook
- Anh Le, research specialist
- Minas Gjoka, research scientist, currently with Google
- Janus Varmarken, Simon Langhoff: visitors from ITU, Copenhagen
Publications
- E. Bakopoulou, A. Shuba, A. Markopoulou, “Exposures Exposed: A Measurement and User Study to Assess Mobile Data Privacy in Context”, in arxiv.org/abs/2008.08973, August 2020.
- A. Shuba, A. Markopoulou, “NoMoATS: Towards Automatic Detection of Mobile Tracking”, Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS/PoPETS) 2020, Issue 2. July 2020, Montreal, Canada. [ Code | Dataset ]
- R. Trimananda, J. Varmarken, A. Markopoulou, B. Demsky, “Packet-Level Signatures for Smart Home Devices,” in Proceedings of the 2020 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). February 2020, San Diego, CA. [ Code | Dataset ]
- Evita Bakopoulou, Balint Tillman, Athina Markopoulou, “A Federated Learning Approach for Mobile Packet Classification”, in arxiv.org/abs/1907.13113 , July 2019.
- E. Alimpertis, A. Markopoulou, C. T. Butts, and K. Psounis, “City-Wide Signal Strength Maps: Prediction with Random Forests”, In Proceedings of the ACM 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’19), May 13–17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA.
- A. Shuba, Z. Shafiq, A. Markopoulou, “NoMoAds: Effective and Efficient Cross-App Mobile Ad-Blocking”, in the Proc. of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2018, Issue 4. July 2018, Barcelona, Spain. Recipient of the The Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award. [ Code | Dataset ]
- A. Shuba, A. Markopoulou, “Demo: A System for Mobile Adblocking and Privacy Exposure Prevention”, MobiHoC Demo, UCLA, June 2018. [video]
- A. Shuba, E. Bakopoulou, A. Markopoulou, “Privacy Leak Classification from Mobile Devices”, In Proc. of SPAWC (19th IEEE Int’l Workshop in Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications“) and Poster Presentation, Kalamata, Greece, June 2018. [Poster | Dataset]
- A. Shuba, E. Bakopoulou, M. Asgari Mehrabadi, H. Le, D. Choffnes, A. Markopoulou, “AntShield: On-Device Detection of Personal Information Exposure”, in arxiv.org/abs/1803.01261, March 2018.
- A. Shuba, A. Le, M. Gjoka, E. Alimpertis, A. Markopoulou, “AntMonitor: System and Applications”, in arxiv.org/abs/1611.04268, Nov. 2016.
- A. Shuba, A. Le, M. Gjoka, J. Varmarken, S. Langhoff, A. Markopoulou, “AntMonitor: Network Traffic Monitoring and Real-Time Prevention of Privacy Leaks in Mobile Devices”, ACM S3 Workshop on Mobile Computing and Networking, Paris, France, Sep 7-10, 2015. Accompanying Demo won the (Best Demo Award in S3).
- A. Le, J. Varmarken, S. Langhoff, A. Shuba, M. Gjoka, A. Markopoulou, “AntMonitor: A System for Monitoring from Mobile Devices,” accepted to ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Crowdsharing of Big Internet Data (C2BID), London, UK, Aug. 17, 2015.
In the News
- NoMoAds wins the Andreas Pfitzmann best student paper award in PETS 2018, Featured in the Engineering and UCI news.
- AntMonitor featured in HSSOE article.
- Athina’s Interview at the DTL Conference 2016.
Presentations
- Presentation at Google Networking Faculty Summit (March 2019) by Athina
- Presentation at Google Android Group (Oct. 1st 2019) by Anastasia
- Anastasia’s DTL Grantee Presentation at the DTLConference 2017.
Tools Available to the Community
- AntMonitor is available as an android app and is open source.
- AntShield dataset is available.
- NoMoAds code and dataset are available.
- NoMoATS: code and dataset are available.
- The TV is Smart and Full of Trackers: dataset available.
- PingPong: code and dataset are available.
1. The AntMonitor App
This is available on GooglePlay in open beta. It demonstrates the real-time capability of AntMonitor to intercept, inspect and visualize network traffic out of the mobile device. It does not record any data or support any add-ons.
2. AntMonitor Open Source
- The AntMonitor app is open source and is available on GitHub.
- Part of the capabilities of AntMonitor to intercept and inspect outgoing packets are also made available as a library. An example of using the library is also available on GitHub.
Contact: antmonitor.uci@gmail.com
Last Updated: May 6th, 2019