floe / mobile-information-systems

Mobile Information Systems lecture materials

Mobile Information Systems lecture materials

Preface

This repository contains lecture materials (mostly slide sets) for a graduate course in mobile information systems. This course was initially held at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in the summer semester 2015 for M.Sc. students in the Computer Science and Media degree. Prerequisites are a bachelor's degree in computer science and good programming skills (theoretical as well as practical) in Java.

Comments, feedback and suggestions for improvement (including pull requests) are very welcome.

Some material was contributed by Prof. Dr. Matthias Kranz (University of Passau), Prof. Dr. Andreas Butz & Dr. Julie Wagner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich) - thanks again!

License

Original copyright © 2015 by Florian Echtler. All material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

As a very brief summary, this means that you can freely use these materials as long as you:

• provide attribution to the original author(s)
• share your modifications under the same or a similar license
• only use them for non-commercial purposes (such as teaching a university course)

Where possible, I have tagged material from external sources with CC (also under a compatible CC license), PD (public domain material) or FU (material which I believe to be included as "fair use").

Contents

The course currently spans 10 weekly sessions with the following topics:

• Introduction & Basics
• Big Issues
• Networks & Location
• I/O on Small Screens Part 1 & 2
• Usage Context
• Privacy & Security
• UbiComp & IoT
• Mixed Reality
• Case Studies

There's also two extra lectures which are very topic-specific and might not work for some audiences:

• Android Internals
• Mobile Algorithms

The course is usually accompanied by an Android-based exercise class every two weeks. As the exercise materials are part of the graded course assignments, I'm currently not including them in this public release.

A video recording of the entire course (except lectures 10 and 12) is available on Youtube, also with CC license.

git and ODT

The files in this repository are in OpenDocument format. If you add the following lines to your ~/.gitconfig file and install the odt2txt utility, you can use the regular git diff command to compare versions etc. (see also here for more details).

[diff "odf"]
	textconv = odt2txt

mobile-information-systems's Issues

Context (L6) kinda sucks

Very oddball collection of leftovers plus a bit of sensor data processing.

07-privacy-security: Certificate pinning deprecated in favor of certificate transparency

Hey Florian,
In your video 7.5 at 3:30 (slide 26 in 07-privacy-security) you talk about HTTPS. I think your video has some outdated information. Certificate pinning is deprecated in favor of Certificate Transparency, read here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key_Pinning

Also, I have a follow up question about your statement that HTTPS doesn’t prevent man in the middle attacks. From what I’ve understood man in the middle attacks are quite difficult to do on HTTPS connections. I hope you can help improve my knowledge on this.

A mobile connects to a server (man in the middle) that functions as a proxy between the mobile and the real server that an app uses. Sure, this would be possible but if the proxy is not signed by a trusted CA for that domain it wouldn’t be able to decode any of the information between the mobile and the real server because it wouldn’t have the encryption key that the two uses.
From my understanding it would only be possible for the proxy to decode the data if it gets a compromised certificate authority to sign its public key for that domain. And the compromised certificate authority would need to be signed by one of the mobile’s other trusted certificate authorities or the root certificate, have I misunderstood something? Thanks

Android Internals (L10) probably completely outdated

Thanks, Google. 😑

Updates

Some slides getting a bit long in the tooth. Suggested updates, in random order:

• Update maruOS, pureOS (L1)
• Add a "Sustainability" topic in L2
• Update research papers in L4,L5
• Update Android security model, Replicant, Openmoko, grapheneOS (L7)
• Talk about two-factor apps vs. SMS codes (L7)
• Discuss "Certificate Transparency" (L7, cf. #1)
• Update IoT hype cycle diagram (L8)
• Move "Trickle Algorithm" from L8 to L12
• Add Matter protocol to IoT standards (L8)
• Discuss OpenRadioAccessNetworks (OpenRAN) in L3?
• Update AirTag case study in L11