DoS attacks exploiting signaling in UMTS and IMS

Authors:
Georgios Kambourakis;Constantinos Kolias;Stefanos Gritzalis;Jong Hyuk Park
Affiliations:
Laboratory of Information and Communication Systems Security, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, GR-83200 Samos, Greece;Laboratory of Information and Communication Systems Security, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, GR-83200 Samos, Greece;Laboratory of Information and Communication Systems Security, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, GR-83200 Samos, Greece;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University of Technology, Republic of Korea
Venue:
Computer Communications
Year:
2011

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Abstract

The Universal Mobile Telecommunication Standard (UMTS) is continuously evolving to meet the growing demand of modern mobile and Internet applications for high capacity and advanced features in security and quality of service. Although admittedly enhanced in terms of security when compared to 2G systems, UMTS still has weaknesses that can lead to security incidents. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerabilities of the UMTS security architecture that can be exploited by a malicious individual to mount Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Our focus is on signaling-oriented attacks above the physical layer. We describe and analyze several novel attacks that can be triggered against both core UMTS architecture as well as hybrid UMTS/WLAN realms. An additional contribution of this paper is the presentation of an extensive survey of similar attacks in UMTS and related protocol infrastructures such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Finally, we offer some suggestions that would provide greater tolerance to the system against DoS attacks.