Denial-of-service attacks on battery-powered mobile computers

Sleep deprivation attacks are a form of denial of service attack whereby an attacker renders a pervasive computing device inoperable by draining the battery more quickly than it would be drained under normal usage. We describe three main methods for an attacker to drain the battery: (1) Service request power attacks, where repeated requests are made to the victim for services, typically over a network--even if the service is not provided the victim must expend energy deciding whether or not to honor the request,(2) benign power attacks, where the victim is made to execute a valid but energy-hungry task repeatedly, and (3) malignant power attacks, where the attacker modifies or creates an executable to make the system consume more energy than it would otherwise. Our initial results demonstrate the increased power consumption due to these attacks, which we believe are the first real examples of these attacks to appear in the literature. We also propose a power-secure architecture to thwart these power attacks by employing multi-level authentication and energy signatures.