Abstract-Reducing power consumption has become a crucial design tenet for both mobile and other small computing devices that are not constantly connected to a power source. However, unlike devices that have a limited and predefined set of functionality, recent mobile smartphone devices have a very rich set of components and can handle multiple general purpose programs that are not a-priori known or profiled.In this paper, we present a general methodology for collecting measurements and modelling power usage on smartphones. Our goal is to characterize the device subsystems and perform accurate power measurements. We implemented a system that effectively accounts for the power usage of all of the primary hardware subsystems on the phone: CPU, display, graphics, GPS, audio, microphone, and Wi-Fi. To achieve that, we make use of the per-subsystem time shares reported by the operating system's power-management module. We present the models capability to further calculate the power consumption of individual applications given measurements, and also the feasibility of our model to operate in real-time and without significant impact in the power footprint of the devices we monitor.

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Abstract-The recent surge in popularity of smart handheld devices, including smart-phones and tablets, has given rise to new challenges in protection of Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Indeed, modern mobile devices store PII for applications that span from email to SMS and from social media to location-based services increasing the concerns of the end user's privacy. Therefore, there is a clear need and expectation for PII data to be protected in the case of loss, theft, or capture of the portable device.In this paper, we present a novel FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) encryption filesystem to protect the removable and persistent storage on heterogeneous smart gadget devices running the Android platform. The proposed filesystem leverages NIST certified cryptographic algorithms to encrypt the dataat-rest. We present an analysis of the security and performance trade-offs in a wide-range of usage and load scenarios. Using existing known micro benchmarks in devices using encryption without any optimization, we show that encrypted operations can incur negligible overhead for read operations and up to twenty (20) times overhead for write operations for I/Ointensive programs. In addition, we quantified the database transaction performance and we observed a 50% operation time slowdown on average when using encryption. We further explore generic and device specific optimizations and gain 10% to 60% performance for different operations reducing the initial cost of encryption. Finally, we show that our approach is easy to install and configure across all Android platforms including mobile phones, tablets, and small notebooks without any user perceivable delay for most of the regular Android applications.

Abstract. Recent advances in the hardware capabilities of mobile handheld devices have fostered the development of open source operating systems and a wealth of applications for mobile phones and table devices. This new generation of smart devices, including iPhone and Google Android, are powerful enough to accomplish most of the user tasks previously requiring a personal computer. Moreover, mobile devices have access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) including a full suite of location services, camera, microphone, among others. In this paper, we discuss the cyber threats that stem from these new smart device capabilities and the online application markets for mobile devices. These threats include malware, data exfiltration, exploitation through USB, and user and data tracking. We will present the ongoing GMU efforts to defend against or mitigate the impact of attacks against mobile devices. Our approaches involve analyzing the source code and binaries of mobile applications, hardening the device by using Kernel-level network and data encryption, and controlling the communication mechanisms for synchronizing the user contents with computers and other phones. We will also explain the enhanced difficulties in dealing with these security issues when the end-goal is to deploy security-enhanced smart phones into military and tactical scenarios. The talk will conclude with a discussion of our current and future research directions.

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