Threats and Countermeasures in GSM Networks

Mobile networks not only provide great benefits to their users but they also introduce inherent security issues. With respect to security, the emerging risks of denial of service (DOS) attacks will evolve into a critical danger as the availability of mobile networks becomes more and more important for the modern information society. This paper outlines a critical flaw in GSM networks which opens the avenue for distributed denial of service attacks. We propose a way to mitigate the attacks by adding minimal authentication to the GSM channel assignment protocol. Keywords–security, denial of service, attack, wireless networks, GSM, GPRS, 2G, DREAD