Location based power analysis to detect malicious code in smartphones

This paper proposes to exploit correlation between a user's location and power consumption pattern of his/her smartphone to detect the presence of malicious code in the smartphone. Based on the observation that user location plays an important role in phone usage, the hypothesis is that there is a strong correlation between smartphone power consumption pattern and location. To verify this hypothesis, a detailed study was conducted in which power consumption data from twenty smartphone users was collected over a period of three months. The paper presents this data and a preliminary analysis shows that there is potential for detecting the presence of malicious code in smartphone by detecting abnormalities in location-based power consumption.