Defending Battery Exhaustion Attacks on Mobile Systems

Battery exhaustion attack is a ldquodenial of servicerdquo attack on mobile devices, causing more battery discharge than normally necessary. The excessive discharge arises out of the limitation in battery capacity. Researches have been conducted to discover the cause of the abnormal usage of handset battery by employing power estimation techniques. It is also important, however, to automatically respond to the attack and maintain the power discharge at the normal level. In this study, we introduce a method designed to detect the defective process and to self-correct the abnormality by stopping or delaying the suspicious actions. The proposed system monitors system calls and the power usage of a local process, and delays activation of the abnormal system calls until the system calls can be run without hampering the battery life. The benefit of our proposed method lies in that it autonomously protects the expected battery lifespan during a battery exhaustion attack without shutting down operation of falsely detected programs.