On attack causality in internet-connected cellular networks
Patrick Traynor, Patrick Drew McDaniel, Thomas La Porta · 2007
The emergence of connections between telecommunications networks and the Internet creates significant avenues for exploitation. For example, through the use of small volumes of targeted traffic, researchers have demonstrated a number of attacks capable of denying service to users in major metropolitan areas. While such investigations have explored the impact of specific vulnerabilities, they neglect to address a larger issue- how the architecture of cellular networks makes these systems susceptible to denial of service attacks. As we show in this paper, these problems have little to do with a mismatch of available bandwidth. Instead, they are the result of the pairing of two networks built on fundamentally opposing design philosophies. We support this a claim by presenting two new attacks on cellular data services. These attacks are capable of preventing the use of high-bandwidth cellular data services throughout an area the size of Manhattan with less than 200Kbps of malicious traffic. We then examine the characteristics common to these and previous attacks as a means of explaining why such vulnerabilites are artifacts of design rigidity. Specifically, we show that the shoehorning of data communications protocols onto a network rigorously optimized for the delivery of voice causes that network to fail under modest loads. 1