PowerApp: Mobile Apps and User Actions Identification via USB Power Channel Analysis

With the advancement of technology, the functionality of mobile applications has become increasingly powerful, and users are heavily relying on these apps for various entertainment and business activities. However, the frequent use of these applications accelerates smartphone battery consumption, which can require multiple charging sessions per day. As a result, USB charging facilities and shared mobile power banks have become more widespread. Although their popularity indeed provides convenience to users, it also introduces security risks, such as information theft through USB data transfer. In this paper, we propose PowerApp, a novel framework that identifies mobile applications running and ongoing user actions by analyzing their energy consumption of a USB-connected mobile device. In particular, we passively measure the current withdrawal by the charging mobile device from the power source. We demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of PowerApp through extensive experiments involving 190 popular mobile apps. Our experimental results show that PowerApp can successfully identify these apps with around 95% accuracy on average.