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!