Exploring energy consumption of juice filming charging attack on smartphones: A pilot study

Abstract

With the increasing demand of smartphone charging, more and more public charging stations are under construction (e.g., airports, subways, shops). This scenario may expose a good chance for cybercriminals to launch charging attacks and steal user’s private information. Juice filming charging (JFC) attack is one example, which can steal users’ sensitive information from both Android OS and iOS devices, through automatically recording phone-screen information and the user inputs during the charging process. The rationale is that users’ information can be leaked through a standard micro USB connector that employs the Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) standard. Motivated by the potential damage of charging attack, we focus on JFC attack in this paper, and investigate for the first time the energy consumption, especially CPU usage caused by JFC attack. In particular, we conduct a user study with over 500 participants and identify that JFC attack may increase CPU usage when connecting the phone to the malicious charger, but this anomaly is hard for raising the attention from a common user. Our work aims to complement existing state-of-the-art results, raise more attention and stimulate more research on charging attacks.