Energy Attacks on Mobile Devices
This addresses a security vulnerability for mobile device users, though it is incremental as it extends energy attack analysis from servers to mobile platforms.
The paper tackles the problem of energy attacks on mobile devices by presenting the first systematic study of how to exploit such attacks on smartphones, showing quantitatively how quickly batteries can be drained through hardware, software, and network-based attacks.
All mobile devices are energy-constrained. They use batteries that allows using the device for a limited amount of time. In general, energy attacks on mobile devices are denial of service (DoS) type of attacks. While previous studies have analyzed the energy attacks in servers, no existing work has analyzed the energy attacks on mobile devices. As such, in this paper, we present the first systematic study on how to exploit the energy attacks on smartphones. In particular, we explore energy attacks from the following aspect: hardware components, software resources, and network communications through the design and implementation of concrete malicious apps, and malicious web pages. We quantitatively show how quickly we can drain the battery through each individual attack, as well as their combinations. Finally, we believe energy exploit will be a practical attack vector and mobile users should be aware of this type of attacks.