Powerslave: Analyzing the Energy Consumption of Mobile Antivirus Software

Battery technology seems unable to keep up with the rapid evolution of smartphones and their applications, which continuously demand more and more energy. Modern smartphones, with their plethora of application scenarios and usage habits, are setting new challenges and constraints for malware detection software. Among these challenges, preserving the battery life as much as possible is one of the most pressing. From the end users’ perspective, a security solution, such as an antivirus (AV), that significantly impacts the battery’s life is unacceptable. Thus, the quality and degree of adoption of malware-detection products is also influenced by their energy demands. Motivated by the above rationale, we perform the first fine-grained measurement that analyzes, at a low level, the energy efficiency of modern, commercial, popular AVs. We explore the relations between various aspects of popular AVs, when handling malicious and benign applications, and the resulting energy consumption. Even though we focus on energy consumption, we also explore other dimensions such as the discrepancies between scanning modes, the impact of file size and scan duration. We then translate our findings into a set of design guidelines for reducing the energy footprint of modern AVs for mobile devices.