2008-05-08 00:00:00 +0000

As computing moves forward technology becomes smaller and more agile. In recent years this has prompted a shift to mobile computing in the form of laptops, cell phones, hand held computers, wireless sensors, and more. This mobile demographic has additional security concerns besides those which typically plague Internet connected devices. These new vulnerabilities are related to the energy performance requirements of this new generation of computers. While there has been a large amount of research analyzing how to increase energy efficiency of various systems there has been little research on the security issues related to energy. My research explores the notion of an Energy Attack, that is an attack which aims to increase power consumption on a device. The intent behind an energy attack can be to drain a battery or to run up the fiscal cost of operation. Such an attack has obvious consequences for emergency situations, such as disaster relief, but the attacks cary less obvious economic consequences for non-critical industries. Also interesting about these attacks is the high likelihood for them to go unnoticed until it is too late. I will post a link to my full paper on this subject later.

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