Taming Energy Cost of Disk Encryption Software on Data-Intensive Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces Populus, a kernel-level disk encryption software for mobile devices that significantly reduces energy consumption by precomputing encryption tasks during initialization, addressing battery life concerns.

Contribution

The paper presents Populus, a novel disk encryption method that precomputes encryption operations to lower energy use on mobile devices, with proven security and substantial energy savings.

Findings

Populus reduces energy consumption by 50%-70% compared to dm-crypt.

Cryptanalysis shows Populus is secure against state-of-the-art attacks.

Precomputing encryption during initialization is effective for energy efficiency.

Abstract

Disk encryption is frequently used to secure confidential data on mobile devices. However, the high energy cost of disk encryption poses a heavy burden on those devices with limited battery capacity especially when a large amount of data needs to be protected by disk encryption. To address the challenge, we develop a new kernel-level disk encryption software, Populus. Almost 98% of Populus's encryption/decryption computation is not related with the input plaintext/ciphertext, so we accomplish the computation in advance during initialization when a consistent power supply is available. We conduct cryptanalysis on Populus and finally conclude that state-of-the-art cryptanalysis techniques fail to break Populus in reasonable computational complexity. We also conduct energy consumption experiments on Populus and dm-crypt, a famous disk encryption software for Android and Linux mobile devices. The experimental results demonstrate that Populus consumes 50%-70% less energy than dm-crypt.