Exploiting Battery-Drain Vulnerabilities in Mobile Smart Devices

Differently from attacks aimed at gaining control of the resources of a mobile device, energy-related attacks have the essential goal of significantly raising the energy demand on the victim side, without apparently affecting its activities. It is a fundamental point to highlight how such a goal can possibly be accomplished by mounting well-known canonical attacks and waiting for the system defenses to detect and stop them. In such an endeavor, defenses require additional amounts of energy which eventually render the mobile device completely useless. In the System on Chip (SoC) architecture, many components, each with a separate function, are integrated. As the total energy adsorption is the composition of the energy consumptions of individual components, each component may be the target of an energy-based attack. This work analyzes and discusses the effects and implication of new energy-based Denial of Service attacks based on the proper solicitation of hardware-layer encode/decode capabilities by using specifically crafted multi-media resources, in order to introduce an anomalous battery drain, and hence significantly shorten the overall battery lifetime in mobile smart devices. These attacks do not require physical access nor compromise of the target device, and they take advantage of new HTML5 functionalities that can be properly triggered during normal browsing activity. The more significant result is that the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) offers an exploitable attack surface to be kept into consideration early in the design process. Countermeasures include special filtering rules that prevent “irrelevant” content from reaching the DSP or, in a more far-reached perspective, the introduction of a power-draw controller on the SoC with the purpose of monitoring energy consumption and raising alerts.