Cellular warfare

1
Cellular warfare

• Karlis Podins
• 2009

2
Outline

• cellular phone networks
• known attacks
• threats introduced by smartphones
• mitigation

3
Cellphone market penetration
4
Reliance on cellular networks
5
Corollary

• Cellular networks are part of national critical
  infrastructure

6
Technical limitations

• GSM 1800
• 372 carrier frequencies
• 8 time slots per frequency
• 2976 theoretical max number of simultaneous voice
  conversations in any given location
• CDMA
• different physical implementation, but also
  limited number of channels
• both having a bottleneck in paging channel

7
Attacks on GSM networks

• saturation of paging channel with SMSes (Traynor,
  2006)
• building hitlists for a geographically targeted
  area
• consuming all voice channels by botnet of
  smartphones (Guo, 2004)

8
Attacks on CDMA

• saturating paging channell by sending UDP packets
  from the internet (Serror, 2006)
• to saturate 10 of paging channel, 13 paging
  requests per second are necessary
• historic data shows drop rate of paging requests
  at 99
• throughput collapses to zero when paging load
  exceeds a critical value

9
Smartphones

• 16 of recent cellular devices sold
• processing power and functionality of a 10 year
  old desktop PC
• OS landscape more diverse
• malware likely to gain popularity, once bad guys
  see a business-case

10
Uses in cyber warfare

• Cause extra disruption in everyday life
• Estonia, Georgia
• DoS emergency call centers, police, military,
  government institutions
• Digital smoke cover for conventional operations
• Available to actors with limited resources, once
  the technology is developed by cybercriminals

11
Defenses

• anomality detection
• probably slow, costly and spoils relations with
  customers
• apropriate queueing strategies at base stations
• if it is working, why to fix it?
• hardware solution
• physical button must be pressed to initiate
  voice/sms communication
• most effective
• needs high political pressure

12
Aitah!