DOS attacks could threaten wireless mobile networks

A new class of DOS attacks threatens to disrupt wireless data networks. Krishan Sabnani, vice president of networking research at Bell Labs, gave this dire warning when he spoke at the Cyber Infrastructure Protection Conference. At stake are inherent weaknesses in the Mobile IP protocol, which is used to triangulate and allow mobile devices to switch seamlessly from one network to another. According to Sabnani, a single broadband user with just 500Kbps of bandwidth can potentially disrupt up to a million users at the same time.

He outlined a few potential attack vectors, with the most basic being a DOS at the signaling level, by creating congestion by unnecessarily re-initiating data sessions using small amounts of data. Conversely, just sending 40 bytes every 10 seconds is sufficient to prevent devices from going into sleep mode--swiftly draining the power from mobile devices.

To highlight the vulnerability of wireless mobile networks, Sabnani also explained how Bell Labs tracked down a subscriber whose excessive use of peer-to-peer was enough to affect the performance of its 3G network. At the moment, it is not clear how these could translate into real-life attacks for gain or profit. Then again, the creators of the Internet probably didn't envisage the kind of security exploits that we are now seeing either.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World

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