Effects of Signaling Attacks on LTE Networks

Attacks on the signaling plane have been well documented for different generations of cellular networks. The effects of these attacks vary from a decrease in the quality of service (QoS) all the way to a denial of service (DoS). Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the next generation cellular network that is primarily designed based on the IP protocol and is expected to achieve wide scale adoption worldwide. LTE employs a different network architecture than its predecessors that should allow for more efficient processing of signaling and data packets. In this paper, we investigate the effects of signaling attacks against Timeworks. An attack consists of malicious users who take advantage of the signaling overhead required to setup and release dedicated bearers in order to overload the signaling plane by repeatedly triggering dedicated bearers requests. The attack is simulated in OPNET under diverse scenarios in order to assess the effects of the increased signaling on the different LTE network entities. The results show that the increased signaling traffic causes higher processing loads at the Enhanced Node-B(eNB) as well as the Evolved Packet Core. We also present a comparison of the signaling requirements in LTE and UMTS.