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“On Cellular Botnets: Measuring the Impact of Malicious Devices on a Cellular Network Core” by Patrick Traynor, Michael Lin, Machigar Ongtang, Vikhyath Rao, Trent Jaeger, Patrick McDaniel, and Thomas La Porta. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '09), 2009, pp. 223-234.

Abstract

The vast expansion of interconnectivity with the Internet and the rapid evolution of highly-capable but largely insecure mobile devices threatens cellular networks. In this paper, we characterize the impact of the large scale compromise and coordination of mobile phones in attacks against the core of these networks. Through a combination of measurement, simulation and analysis, we demonstrate the ability of a botnet composed of as few as 11,750 compromised mobile phones to degrade service to area-code sized regions by 93%. As such attacks are accomplished through the execution of network service requests and not a constant stream of phone calls, users are unlikely to be aware of their occurrence. We then investigate a number of significant network bottlenecks, their impact on the density of compromised nodes per base station and how they can be avoided. We conclude by discussing a number of counter-measures that may help to partially mitigate the threats posed by such attacks.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{ccs09-traynor,
   author = {Patrick Traynor and Michael Lin and Machigar Ongtang and
	Vikhyath Rao and Trent Jaeger and Patrick McDaniel and La Porta,
	Thomas},
   title = {{On Cellular Botnets: Measuring} the Impact of Malicious
	Devices on a Cellular Network Core},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and
	Communications Security (CCS '09)},
   pages = {223--234},
   publisher = {ACM},
   year = {2009}
}

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