Control Theoretic Adaptive Monitoring Tools

Abstract

With the escalation of attacks that target mobile devices there is an increasing need for efficient monitoring tools. Due to computation, storage, and power constraints of the devices, these monitoring tools may overload the entire system causing severe performance degradation for the running applications. Moreover, they can be pushed by resource-intensive applications and may not perform an adequate monitoring job. To that end, in this project we develop adaptive monitoring tools that are capable of monitoring a wide range of information while efficiently utilizing the available resources on the mobile device. We apply control theoretic techniques to design monitoring functionalities, such as process, integrity and network monitors, that utilize the underlying resources efficiently. This is achieved through controllers that dynamically select the duty cycles of the monitors. Our models and results are validated on the Android platform through emulation and real implementation on the Nexus 7 tablet.