# Taming Energy Cost of Disk Encryption Software on Data-Intensive Mobile Devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07543 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07543/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Taming the Security-Energy Paradox: A Green AI Approach to Optimized Android Malware Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20003/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Disk encryption is frequently used to secure confidential data on mobile devices. However, the high energy cost of disk encryption poses a heavy burden on those devices with limited battery capacity especially when a large amount of data needs to be protected by disk encryption. To address the challenge, we develop a new kernel-level disk encryption software, Populus. Almost 98% of Populus's encryption/decryption computation is not related with the input plaintext/ciphertext, so we accomplish the computation in advance during initialization when a consistent power supply is available. We conduct cryptanalysis on Populus and finally conclude that state-of-the-art cryptanalysis techniques fail to break Populus in reasonable computational complexity. We also conduct energy consumption experiments on Populus and dm-crypt, a famous disk encryption software for Android and Linux mobile devices. The experimental results demonstrate that Populus consumes 50%-70% less energy than dm-crypt.