An Offensive and Defensive Exposition of Wearable Computing

Abstract

Wearable computing is rapidly getting deployed in many—commercial, medical, and personal—domains of day-to-day life. Wearable devices appear in various forms, shapes, and sizes and facilitate a wide variety of applications in many domains of life. However, wearables raise unique security and privacy concerns. Wearables also hold the promise to help enhance the existing security, privacy, and safety paradigms in unique ways while preserving the system’s usability. The contribution of this research literature survey is threefold. First, as a background, we identify a wide range of existing as well as upcoming wearable devices and investigate their broad applications. Second, we provide an exposition of the security and privacy of wearable computing, studying dual aspects, that is, both attacks and defenses. Third, we provide a comprehensive study of the potential security, privacy, and safety enhancements to existing systems based on the emergence of wearable technology. Although several research works have emerged exploring different offensive and defensive uses of wearables, there is a lack of a broad and precise literature review systematizing all those security and privacy aspects and the underlying threat models. This research survey also analyzes current and emerging research trends and provides directions for future research.