Battery Exhaustion Attack Detection with Small Handheld Mobile Computers

This paper describes a unique battery-sensing intrusion protection system (B-SIPS) for mobile computers, which alerts on power changes detected on small wireless devices, using an innovative Dynamic Threshold Calculation algorithm. B-SIPS enabled hosts are employed as sensors in a wireless network and form the basis of the intrusion detection system (IDS). B-SIPS implementation correlates device power consumption with IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi and 802.15.1 Bluetooth communication activity. This battery exhaustion, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth attack detection capability is scalable and complementary with existing commercial and open system network IDSs. Irregular and attack activity is detected and reported to an intrusion detection engine for correlation with existing trace signatures in a database and for forensic investigation by a security manager.