  Green computing has become a growing trend in computing, pursuing the goal of
helping software developers to pay more attention to produce energy-effiency
software. This is specially relevant for battery-powered mobile applications,
where minimizing the energy consumption is required to both mitigate the
greenhouse effect and to extend the battery lifetime. In this paper we analyze
the energy consumption of cryptographic primitives in Android devices. Our
ultimate goal is to help Android application developers, especially those who
are not experts on security, to choose the most energy efficient cryptographic
algorithms considering different security providers and different security
transformations. We have performed our experiments using an energy profiling
tool based on the PowerTutor application. Our results show that this type of
energy efficiency studies are necessary, because selecting the most energy
efficient configuration depends on many factors, and some of the conclusions
are not so obvious.
