Secure and energy efficient prefetching design for smartphones

Energy efficient prefetching systems for smart-phones can greatly reduce energy consumption and data transmission, and maintain the timely response when information is prefetched. However, the proxy structure of the system can cause security problem to reveal private information to the third party. The end-to-end encryption (SSL) in traditional prefetching systems cannot solve the security problem in this new, complex energy efficient prefetching system. In this paper, we propose Secure and Energy Efficient Prefetching (SEEP) to meet the security requirement of HTTPS connections and to save smartphone's energy consumption and data transmission. The new design of SEEP includes two parts: the local proxy on the smartphone to verify the validity of prefetched responses, and the remote proxy (e.g. on the cloudlet) to store encrypted prefetched responses. SEEP is transparent to both smartphones and web servers, which does not need to change today's Browser/Server framework. Security analysis shows that SEEP protects the confidentiality of requests and responses, and is able to resist replay attack from malicious proxy. Experimental results show that the proposed system consumes 25% less energy and 95% less data when prefetching 10 outbound webpages than the traditional prefetching system in Wi-Fi networks.