Towards energy-aware intrusion detection systems on mobile devices

Abstract

This paper investigates the correlations between the energy consumption of Android devices and the presence of threats (e.g. battery-drain attacks). In particular, this paper proposes a model for the energy consumption of single hardware components of a mobile device during normal usage and under attack. The model has been implemented in a kernel module and used to build up an energetic signature of both legal and malicious behaviors of WiFi hardware component in different Android devices. Such activity allows us to build a tentative database of signatures that can be used to detect attacks by means of the actual energy consumption of a mobile device. The proposed power consumption model and kernel module can be applied also to other hardware components, so to obtain very precise energetic signatures.