A Review of Significance of Energy-Consumption Anomaly in Malware Detection in Mobile Devices

Mobile devices, such as smartphones, have become an important part of modern lives. However, as these devices have tremendously become popular they are attracting a range of attacks. Malware is one of the serious threats posed to smartphones by the attackers. Due to the limited resources of mobile devices malware detection on these devices remains a challenge. Malware detection techniques based on energy-consumption anomaly present several advantages to circumvent the resource constraints of mobile devices. This paper reviews the selected energy consumption based malware detection methods and presents an analysis of the significance of the energyconsumption behaviour in determining the following: i) the causes of the energy-drain in mobile devices, ii) energy consumption pattern indicating the type and hence the behaviour of an application iii) energy consumption anomaly in detecting malicious activity. The challenges faced in developing energy-based detection methods and advantages of such methods are also discussed. The paper mainly focuses on Android platform.