Wearable technology can track your movement, location, heart rate and even what you’re looking at, and two researchers from Wichita State University want to know how secure this stored data is.
Professors Jibo He of the psychology department and Murtuza Jadliwala of the electrical engineering and computer science department were recently awarded a three-year grant worth $380,000 by the National Science Foundation.
With the help of graduate students, they’ll use the funds to investigate cyber security issues in wearable devices like FitBits, Google Glass and Apple Watches.
The research has already begun, but the added grant money will extend the project and will help to include more graduate students.
Professor Jadliwala says people should know how safe their personal data is as this technology becomes more widely available.
“I don’t want to alarm people, but we should know more about the technology that we’re using every day,” he says. “I think the threat from these devices is real.”
The professors plan to investigate and identify security weaknesses in wearable technology. Jadliwala says the research can be used to design more secure software and authentication techniques.
Some of the grant money will be used to purchase the devices and to travel to conferences to present their findings.
