A secure energy-efficient m-banking application for mobile devices

► This paper explores the concept of energy consumption in mobile applications working with sensitive data. ► A secure, energy-efficient mobile-banking solution has been designed, implemented, and tested in a real scenario. ► Providing security at the application layer allows applying different security policies to the information transmitted. ► We have designed message formats and message exchanges to reduce time processing, bandwidth use, and energy consumption. ► Compared to a web-based/SSL access, our protocol saves energy and power in the ranges of 20–70% and 16–46% respectively. Mobile banking is one of the emerging services in telecommunications due to the explosive increase in the number of mobile customers around the world. Solutions for mobile banking are varied, ranging from the use of Wireless Transport Layer Security, Security Socket Layer, or application-layer based options. Whereas security at the transport layer is a good choice for e-banking, using it in a mobile device presents several disadvantages such as high energy consumption. In this work, we present a secure energy-efficient m-banking solution for mobile devices. We propose an application-layer protocol whose message formats and message exchanges are designed to reduce time processing, bandwidth use, and energy consumption. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that our secure solution reduces power and energy consumption in more than 30% compared to a secure web-access from the mobile device.