Investigating energy and security trade-offs in the classroom with the atom LEAP testbed

We recently used the Atom LEAP as the foundation for CS 188, an undergraduate research seminar investigating potential trade-offs between security and energy consumption in a hypothetical, battery-powered tablet device. Twenty-three students, in five groups, researched the energy costs of full disk encryption, network cryptography, and sandboxing techniques, as well as the potential savings from two concepts: offloading security computation, and enabling user-level applications to modulate their security behavior based on battery capacity and environmental security. The Atom LEAP is an exciting and powerful tool. A self-contained energy measurement platform, it can generate 10,000 component-level power samples per second during runtime. The Atom LEAP synchronizes individual samples to the time stamp counter of the Intel Atom CPU, allowing us to measure small code segments in the kernel or in user space. The success of CS 188 was possible because of the Atom LEAP’s unique capabilities and ease of use. Following the success of the class, we are working to improve the hardware and software tools, in the hope that the Atom LEAP might someday become a widespread tool for energy research and education.