On Effects of Mobility Management Signalling Based DoS Attacks Against LTE Terminals

Long Term Evolution (LTE) has become the most mature and stable mobile communication network technology worldwide so far. Billions of mobile subscribers are using LTE networks to surf the Internet, make phone calls, and send text messages every day. Meanwhile, Denial-of- Service (DoS) attacks seriously threaten the availability of LTE networks. In this paper, we focus on the research into the effects of reject signalling based DoS attacks against LTE terminals. We revealed a new DoS attack vulnerability in the authentication procedure after a detailed exploration in 3GPP standard specifications and verified it using software radio tools. Moreover, we specifically tested the impacts of such device-targeted DoS attacks on users under different test conditions (e.g. different operators, chip vendors, etc and we classified the actual test results into 6 different impact levels to better evaluate the effects on subscribers. Several possible countermeasures are also discussed to defend the attacks.