Outsmarting Proctors with Smartwatches:
A Case Study on Wearable Computing Security
Alex Migicovsky, Zakir Durumeric, Jeff Ringenberg, and J. Alex Halderman
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109, USA{amigi,zakir,jringenb,jhalderm}@umich.edu

Abstract. Many companies have recently started to offer wearable computing devices including glasses, bracelets, and watches. While this technology enables exciting new applications, it also poses new security andprivacy concerns. In this work, we explore these implications and analyze
the impact of one of the first networked wearable devices—smartwatches—on an academic environment. As a proof of concept, we develop an
application for the Pebble smartwatch called ConTest that would allow
dishonest students to inconspicuously collaborate on multiple-choice exams in real time, using a cloud-based service, a smartphone, and a client
application on a smartwatch. We discuss the broader implications of thistechnology, suggest hardware and software approaches that can be used
to prevent such attacks, and pose questions for future research.
Keywords: security, wearable computing, smartwatches, cheating

1

Introduction

Recent hardware advances have led to the development and consumerization of
wearable computing devices ranging from exercise and sleep tracking bracelets [6]to augmented reality glasses [8]. While these new technologies enable a spectrumof new applications, they also introduce security and privacy questions that arelargely unexplored.
The introduction of smartphones created important new risks to users’ privacy
due to their mobility, ubiquity, and wealth of sensors—wearable computing form
factors are likely to magnify these threats. For instance, while smartphonemalware can hijack the sensors to spy on the user, video-capable smartglasses or
smartwatches are worn continuously outside the clothing where they are evenbetter positioned to record both the user’s activities and those of others nearby.
Beyond risks to the user’s own privacy, wearables have the potential to bemaliciously deployed by the users themselves to violate the security and privacyof others. These threats will be particularly acute in coming years: as wearables
gradually become widespread and inconspicuous, they will challenge longstandingsocial norms and violate expectations about the capabilities of technology. For
instance, glasses and wristwatches are socially acceptable in situations where*

Revised January 31, 2014. For the latest version, visit https://jhalderm.com/papers/.

the use of smartphones and computers might not be and they can be used tosurreptitiously capture and exfiltrate data in violation of privacy expectations.
In this paper, we examine a second dimension in which wearables challenge
existing threat models: they have the potential to secretly receive data or perform
computations in ways that confer an underhanded advantage to the user, suchas helping count cards in a casino or cheating on an exam. Although wearables
encompass a diverse range of form factors, we focus on smartwatches because
they are among the first feature-rich and programmable wearable devices to reacha broad consumer audience.
As a proof of concept, we examine how smartwatches can lead to realistic
attacks on an academic testing environment. Using the Pebble smartwatch
platform, we demonstrate a prototype cloud-backed application called ConTest
that would enable dishonest students to covertly collaborate on multiple-choice
exams. We also discuss defensive countermeasures for this class of attacks anduse the perspective of this case study to draw broader security lessons about the
future of wearable computing technologies.

2

Related Work

Most prior work has focused on the security of wearable devices themselves and on
the privacy of the data produced by these technologies [9,12,13,14,18]. However,there has been little work exploring the implications of such devices within current
day society, despite increasing interest [20]. In this work, we primarily focus on
the implications of new wearable devices and how users can potentially abuse
these devices—not on securing the devices themselves or the data they produce.
Another interesting aspect of our example attack is that it relies on multiple
devices with different feature sets to execute the attack. A smartwatch alone may
not pose security risks, but combining features of many wearables may allow for
security vulnerabilities. This concept was investigated by Denning et al. as it
applied to household robots [4].
There has also been previous work on the dynamics of cheating outside of thecomputational space [3,7,10]. However, a large portion of the research assumes
that users may only collaboratively cheat if test takers are sitting side-by-side [10].
The attack we introduce eliminates this restriction.
There is growing precedent for students using emerging technology to cheat.
In one widely reported case, a student in Thailand was caught using a watch withphone capabilities to send text messages during an exam [21]. In another instance,a man taking a driver’s license test used a small video camera to send live videoof the questions to a remote party who helped him correctly answer them via
an earpiece [15]. Students have also used programmable graphing calculators,
Bluetooth pens, and invisible ink to cheat on exams [17]. Such high-tech cheating
may become even more widespread as wearable devices gain in popularity anddecrease in detectability.

Fig. 1: Left: IBM created thisLinux smartwatch prototype
in 2000, but it was never commercialized; image adaptedfrom [16]. Right: The Pebble
Smartwatch came on the market in 2012.

3

Smartwatches

Wristwatches have evolved significantly over the last half-century from theintroduction of the first digital watches in the 1960s to what we now term
“smartwatches”—fully programmable watches with the capability to interact withother devices and Internet services [11]. The first smartwatch was introduced in2000 by IBM, which demonstrated a prototype watch running Linux and poweredby an ARM processor (Figure 1; left). The device was bulky and the prototype
was never commercialized [16].
In late 2012, Pebble Technology released the first successful consumer smartwatch (Figure 1; right) after receiving funding through Kickstarter. As of July
2013, more than 85,000 of the devices had been sold [2]. The most recent versionof the watch includes an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, a 144 × 168 pixel blackand-white e-paper display, Bluetooth 4.0, a vibrating motor, digital compass,accelerometer, and Lithium-ion battery. Pebble provides a software developmentkit (SDK) that allows programmers to create applications for the watch andprovides APIs for Bluetooth communication, local storage, time synchronization,
graphics drawing, and button and vibration control.
Today’s smartwatches have relatively limited hardware capabilities comparedto smartphones or laptops, limiting the set of security mechanisms that can beapplied locally within the devices. Furthermore, the Pebble architecture places
a large amount of trust in the user’s smartphone, with which the watch pairs
via Bluetooth. An app on the phone is responsible for updating the watch’s
firmware, transferring data to and from the Internet, and installing and managing
apps on the watch, all of which compounds the watch’s attack surface. However,advances in technology are likely to remove these limitations in future generationsof smartwatches and other wearable devices.

4

ConTest: Cheating by Smartwatch

In order to illustrate some of the disruptive security implications of wearable
technologies such as smartwatches, we developed ConTest, an application for theFig. 2: ConTest Architecture — A light-weight app on the Pebble smartwatch
interfaces via Bluetooth with a control app running on a smartphone. The
smartphone app in turn communicates with a centralized cloud-based service.

Pebble smartwatch that is designed to allow dishonest students to inconspicuously
share and vote on answers during multiple-choice exams in real-time. Society’s
expectations about the capabilities of wristwatches have yet to catch up to the newcapabilities of devices such as Pebble. While smartphones are prohibited in many
exams, including the ACT and SAT, digital watches are currently allowed [1,19].
ConTest is nearly indistinguishable from a standard watch, provides a difficultto-notice user interface, and allows students to cheat in a manner similar to if
they had readily available access to a smartphone during an exam.
ConTest is composed of three components: a client application for the Pebble
smartwatch that allows users to vote and view the collaboratively decided solutions, a cloud-based service that coordinates answer sharing, and an application
for the smartphone that relays data between the smartwatch and the central
service. The application architecture is shown in Figure 2.
Cheating by smartwatch presents a realistic threat today. Pebble smartwatches
are available for $150, smartphones have become ubiquitous among students,
and web hosting providers such as Amazon EC2 and Heroku are available forfree or at negligible cost. Even if used among a small conspiracy of students,
ConTest has potential for impacting exam scores, because research has shownthat a dishonest student needs to view the collective answers of only four students
in order to perform satisfactorily on an exam [10].
Cloud Application A cloud-based server provides a central service that stores
and aggregates exam responses submitted by individual users. It determines
the most common response to each question and distributes it back to eachsmartwatch as necessary. This central service could also potentially perform moreFig. 3: ConTest Prototype — At a distance (left), the application appears to
be an innocuous clock face. Closer inspection reveals the question number andanswer displays (right), encoded in groups of missing pixels.

complex calculations, such as distinguishing between multiple forms of an examor allowing a third-party to authoritatively provide answers instead of relying
on crowdsourced solutions. We implemented the server using Ruby on Rails andhosted it via Heroku.
Smartphone Application Before entering a testing environment, a student
pairs a Pebble smartwatch with a smartphone and installs a smartphone appthat allows them to select the exam they are going to take. During the exam, thesmartphone app relays data between the Pebble and the cloud-based server. While
the attack does require a smartphone for communication, no further interaction isrequired on the smartphone during the exam itself. The smartphone can remainout of sight in the student’s jacket or backpack. The smartphone app runs on
iOS and is implemented using the iOS and Pebble SDKs.
Smartwatch Application The smartwatch component of ConTest allows
users to both provide and view collaboratively decided answers. In order to makethe app more difficult for proctors or other test takers to notice, the correct date
and time are shown on the watch face as usual. The questions and answers areindicated by inverting small groups of noncritical pixels, as shown in Figure 3.
The answer to the selected question is encoded by mapping each of the digits
in the time to an answer and inverting a small number of pixels in the digit
to indicate its selection. For example, in Figure 3, the purple-circled block ofmissing pixels in the five indicates that the user has voted for answer D and the
red-circled block of pixels in the seven indicates that the most popular answer
selected by other users is B. As seen in the figure, this surreptitious form ofdisplaying answers is clear to the user at close range, but practically invisible toanyone examining the watch from a longer distance.
The user can vote for a particular answer by double-clicking the watch buttons.
When a user changes their vote, the new answer is immediately relayed to theFig. 4: ConTest Protocol Schematic — When providing answers (top), thesmartwatch app transmits test answers volunteered by users to the cloud-based
service. When receiving answers (bottom), the app queries the service for theanswer to a numbered question and receives the consensus response.

service and other watches. A similar approach is used to choose the question
number. The selected question number is encoded in binary in the date. For
example, the blue-circled digits in Figure 3 indicate that the displayed solution
is for question 13. The selected answer can be changed by single-clicking thebuilt-in buttons on the watch.

5

Defenses and Lessons

The obvious solution for preventing students from cheating using smartwatches
is to ban the devices from exams. Even as smartwatches become commonplaceand harder to distinguish, it would not be out of the question to ban all types ofwristwatches and to instead provide wall clocks. The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) has adopted a policy along these lines in which it bans all forms ofdigital watches from its examination centers [5]. Exams can also be constructed
to be more resilient to such attacks, particularly if the test is computerized, byrandomly selecting and ordering questions and answers.
However, while it may be be obvious to ban smart devices in controlledenvironments such as during an exam or at a casino, this may not be feasible inother situations such as at public events. Devices will continue to evolve, bothdecreasing in size and detectability and improving in terms of processing power,
sensing capability, and connectivity. As wearable devices begin to include features
such as integrated cameras and direct Internet connectivity, there is further
potential for abuse such as covertly monitoring private meetings. Further, as thesetechnologies continue to become integrated into our daily lives, e.g. smartglasses
that are integrated with prescription eye-ware, users may be dependent on thesewearables, making it burdensome for users to simply remove a device.

While wearables are likely have disruptive security effects, the computing
and communication capabilities of these devices might also be harnessed tocreate new countermeasures. One simplistic approach would be to implement
software-based restrictions that could be switched on by an external signal orwhen the device recognizes it is in a special environment, such as an exam modethat disables third-party applications on the Pebble. However, such restrictions
might be readily bypassed if the devices are not locked down by the manufacturer.
Future work is needed to determine whether wearable devices can be designedwith flexible, safe, and guaranteeable restrictions.

6

Conclusion

Wearable technologies offer an exciting platform for new types of applications
and have the potential to more tightly integrate computing within daily life.
However, they also pose new security and privacy concerns. Wearables are prone
to many of the same attacks as smartphones, but they may pose increased risks
due to their novel form factors. Many questions arise over the privacy of thedata collected by these devices, and their potential to inconspicuously recordand stream sensor data in social settings. In this work, we explored another new
security dimension, how wearable devices can be maliciously used by their owners
to violate existing security paradigms.
We introduced ConTest, an application for the Pebble smartwatch thatcan be used by dishonest students to collaboratively cheat on multiple-choice
exams. ConTest demonstrates that today’s wearable technology already posesa meaningful threat to existing threat models, and future wearable devices arelikely to be even more disruptive. Although preventing cheating by banning suchdevices from testing environments may be somewhat effective, in the long run,threat models will need to be revised to take into account the rapidly increasing
capabilities of wearable computing.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Martin Strauss for insightful guidance and Phil andJill Migicovsky for early help and feedback. This work was supported in part by
the National Science Foundation (NSF) under contract numbers CNS 1111699
and CNS 1255153.

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