UC Irvine

As smartphones and mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous and mobile applications increasingly use the network both while active or in the background, users are unaware of the continuous network activity on their phone. In this thesis, we use fine-grained network traffic measurements from mobile devices to make users aware of the network traffic activity on their devices. We use {\tt AntMonitor}\cite{shuba2016antmonitor} - a system for monitoring network traffic, to intercept network packets in mobile devices. We use the data collected by {\tt AntMonitor}, to provide visualization of network activity, not only on a server but also - and for the first time- on the device and in real-time. The visualizations on the phone informs the users about the servers the different applications on the phone communicate with over the Internet. The visualization on the server, with the data collected from the phone, gives the user a more detailed perspective of the network activity on their phones and over a period of time. In this thesis we describe the design and implementation of these visualizations and we discuss how they can be used to enhance the users' understanding about the network activity on their phones.