The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the U.S. has gotten some frighteningly bad news as a paper filed with the government agency states that anyone can disrupt an LTE network using equipment that costs only $650. The technique can be used against any mobile network in the country but the most dangerous target could be NTIA’s own FirstNet. This means that terrorists could easily take down the emergency communications network that was specifically developed after the attacks of September 11.
The researchers behind the paper, director of the wireless research group at Virginia Tech Jeff Reed and his research assistant Marc Lichtman, claim that “it’s relatively easy to do” and that if the attacker used a power amplifier they could affect an area as large as New York state. Another issue is that authorities will have a hard time fighting against such an attack because of “structural, intrinsic vulnerabilities to the LTE architecture.”
Lichtman that any communication engineer that can use eight different methods to attack the network. He explains that, “Your phone is constantly syncing with the base station. If you can disrupt that synchronization, you will not be able to send or receive data. There are multiple weak spots-about eight different attacks are possible. The LTE signal is very complex, made up of many subsystems, and in each case, if you take out one subsystem, you take out the entire base station. Any communications engineer would be able to figure this stuff out.”
For now if LTE shuts down communication can take place on 3G and 2G networks. However, data shows that by 2017 half the people using mobiles around the world will be doing so on a LTE network. This also includes government agencies and emergency responders.
There is no solution to the vulnerability at this point and Reed explains that, “LTE does a good job of [encrypting the communications]. But unconventional security aspects, such as preventing signal jamming, have been largely overlooked.”
Source: Gizmodo
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