Events & News
Computer Science Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, March 6, 2008 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Light refreshments served in the 9th floor atrium at 10:45 AM. |
| Speaker | Patrick Traynor |
| Affiliation | Pennsylvania State University |
Characterizing the Impact of Rigidity on the Security of Cellular Networks
The rapid influx of new applications and connections with the Internet
threaten the security of cellular telecommunications networks. In
particular, the tight engineering of these systems to support
circuit-switched voice communications allows an adversary to use such
emerging services to force cellular networks to fail at traffic volumes
far below their capacity.
In this talk, I explore vulnerabilities resulting from rigidity, or the inflexible treatment of all traffic according to telephony-specific optimizations. I present several demonstrative attacks capable of preventing legitimate users from receiving any traffic (voice, text messages or data) in major metropolitan areas such as Manhattan with the bandwidth available to a single home cable modem. I then more formally characterize the impact of such attacks and measure the efficacy of countermeasures using queuing techniques and simulation, and explore the underlying cause of such attacks using traditional network security methods.
In so doing, this talk highlights the fact that imposing deeply-rooted assumptions about the characteristics of circuit-switched flows on packet-switched traffic creates an exploitable point of amplification through which an adversary can disable these systems. The talk concludes with a discussion of open problems and future work in securing
telecommunications networks.
Biography
Patrick Traynor earned his Ph.D from the Pennsylvania State University,
where he is currently a member of the Systems and Internet
Infrastructure Security (SIIS) Laboratory and the Networking and
Security Research Center (NSRC). His research focuses on the security of
cellular networks, with special attention on the impact of
interconnectivity with the larger Internet. He is also interested in,
among a wide range of topics, security issues as they relate to the
Internet, wireless networks and applied cryptography.