Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps

This repository contains the source code and sample data for the PETS'22 paper by Yucheng Yang, Jack West, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith, and Kassen Fawaz.

Componets

Here is a brief description of the subdirectories in this repository.

• UserStudy: full user study analysis script and user study results of all valid participants, coded answers by two researchers, and user study questionnaire details.
• BgActivityClassifier: python scripts for training our background activity classifiers.
• dataset: extracted sample data from Webex outgoing traffic.
• scripts: traffic interception scripts used for capturing telemetric packets from Webex outgoing traffic.

Dependencies

There are two components to this repository. This repository contains the C code examples for Linux data gathering and python scripts to gather, examine, and plot data. Tools needed to run the code:

- GCC
- Python3
- make 
- portaudio19-dev
- vlc

All ubuntu packages are located within the dockerfile script.

Virtual Environment Setup

The python scripts have a few dependencies. We recomend using a virtal environment when installing the packages. However, if one does not want to use a virtual environment, install using the command pip install -r ./requirements.txt

For those interested in using a virtual environment, the instructions are as follows:

#First create the environment in the root directory. 
> python3 -m venv Mute_Button

#Then run this command
> source Mute_Button/bin/activate
#The above command will put your shell into the context of the python virtual environment

#Then, once in the environment, your terminal should have the name of the environment leading the terminal command.
#Now you may install the python packages. 
(Mute_Button) > pip3 install -r ./requirements.txt

The above commands are designed for linux. Windows has a slightly different process, to access instructions for the same process on Windows go here.

The virtual environment will create a Mute_Button folder which will be about 2 GBs.

Docker Setup

We also offer docker as an alternative method for executing our code base. Those who wish to use the docker be warned that the image will be 9Gb.

You will need to clone Dynamorio into the root of this directory.

Steps

Below we will walk a user through how to install the docker image on their machine. We assume that the user has docker installed.

1. Clone DynamoRIO in the root of this reposoitory(see second paragraph of this section for version recomendations).
2. docker build -t vca . This step builds the docker image using the build script our repository's home directory. The build requires at least 9Gb of free space. This step compiles dynamorio and installs all the python dependencies. Also, the compiling of dynamorio will take all cores. If that is an issue, you can change the make -j setting in the docker script to what you would like.
3. docker run -itd vca This command creates a container for the image we have just created after running the first command.
4. docker exec -it <Name of container> /bin/bash This command will allow the user to enter the container and execute the code. You can get the name of a currently active container by running, docker ps . Upon entering the command, you will now be able to execute all code with little issue.

Docker Excluded Script

The scripts/data_collection/Windows/play_video_script.py will not work within the docker image. This is because the docker image will need to have access to a machine's audio interface. Each machine is different and will require the local user to set up a connection with the docker container. We apologize for not including the script's functionality within the docker container.

Authors

Yucheng Yang - Github - [email protected]

Jack West - Github - [email protected]