According to the TechRadar website, in the first quarter of 2016 alone, the sales of various fitness trackers worldwide reached about 20 million units. It can be seen that many people around the world care about their health.
But according to a new study, these people should be more concerned about the safety of their fitness tracker to collect data. Researchers at the Darmstadt University of Technology and the University of Padua studied 17 models of fitness trackers sold on the market and found that they had serious security breaches.
While almost all tracking systems that use cloud services use cryptographic protocols such as HTTPS to transmit their data, in almost all cases, researchers can tamper with the transmitted data. In an attack, they successfully "convinced" the tracker to "tell" the server: the user walked 80 million steps in a day.
TechRadar said that although four vendors have taken some measures to protect the integrity of user data, the researchers found that these measures are not enough to protect data security. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, head of the research team, said, "These measures are not enough to stop motivated hackers, and almost no IT knowledge is required, so hackers can modify the data."
This is a problem because fitness tracker data is increasingly being used in court, and some insurance companies offer premium discounts to users who share fitness data. Hackers can easily gain financial benefits or influence criminal trials.
TechRadar said that not only that, but researchers also found that several vendors store fitness data in clear text. If the device is stolen or infected with malicious items, this creates the risk of data being stolen by hackers.
Shadiji said, “Medical insurance companies and other companies that want to use fitness trackers in their services should seek advice from security experts.†Technologies that prevent this happen, but “vendors deploy these technologies in their products. More needs to be done."
A similar study conducted earlier by Binghamton University and Stevens Institute of Technology found that the data leaked by the fitness tracker revealed the user's bank password.
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