[Research] Energy consumption of Orbot on Android

[lambdapioneer]

Hello Orbot team,

I am a mobile security researcher and during the last year I have investigated the energy consumption of mobile Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) on smartphones. As part of this project, I also did some measurements of Orbot on Android.

Overall the results for Orbot look pretty solid which I why I thought this might be interesting to you. The paper and presentation are available as open-access on the USENIX Security website: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/hugenroth

I hope the measurements and results are helpful to you. In particular, I found that enabling (full) connection padding had a large impact---especially on 4G. Therefore, this might give you some data points for choosing the best configuration defaults.

This is the main Orbot figure from the paper which shows the Tor-related power consumption measurements:

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or suggestions for related/further research.

Best wishes, Daniel

P.S. I created an issue, as I could not find a Orbot specific email address. I hope that is alright. Feel free to move this to a mail thread and/or to close it as you seem fit.