On cellular botnets: Measuring the impact of malicious devices on a cellular network core

The vast expansion of interconnectivity with the Internet and the rapid evolution of highly-capable but largely insecure mobile de-vices 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 demon-strate the ability of a botnet composed of as few as 11,750 compro-mised 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 inves-tigate 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