Investigation of Power Consumption Attack on Android Devices

Abstract

With the evolution of mobile technology, advanced features, such as location services and multimedia functions, have been developed for smartphones and tablets. However, the use of these functions consumes a large amount of electric power. A malicious application can exploit these functions and intentionally consume electric power to adversely affect the device. In this study, we investigated and evaluated a method of intentionally draining the device battery using multiple functions that consume a large amount of electric power on Android devices. As a result, we were able to reduce the usable time of the batteries of two Android devices to 3.1 h and 3.2 h, respectively. The results indicated that it is possible to execute an attack that intentionally increases the power consumption of Android devices and reduces the battery life.