Multimedia-based battery drain attacks for Android devices

Abstract

People using smartphones to connect to the Internet for day-life activities has overtaken the number of people using canonical PCs. This lead to a huge quantity of security threats that usually tend to penetrate the defenses of a smartphone in order to gain control of its resources. Differently, energy-based attacks have the objective of increasing the energy consumption of the victim device. It is important to highlight that this objective could be possibly achieved by just activating the system's defenses as a consequence of canonical attacks and letting the system defenses detect and (try to) defeat them. These activities consume additional energy and could led the mobile device to its complete uselessness. In this paper, an energy-based attack based on soliciting hardware-level encoding/decoding functions through properly crafted multimedia files is analyzed and its impact evaluated. Such kind of attacks are performed without accessing the device by taking advantage of the new HTML5 functionalities. A series of experiments have been performed in order to understand which are the codecs that have a more relevant impact on energy consumption, and, as a consequence, that make the attack more effective.