# Energy Attacks on Mobile Devices

## TL;DR

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of energy attacks on mobile devices, demonstrating how malicious apps and web pages can rapidly drain batteries, highlighting a new security concern for smartphone users.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive study on energy attacks on smartphones, including design, implementation, and quantitative evaluation of attack methods.

## Key findings

- Energy attacks can rapidly deplete smartphone batteries.
- Different attack vectors have varying effectiveness.
- Combined attacks are more potent in draining energy.

## Abstract

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.