Welcome to my old blog, which I no longer maintain.

For details of my current professional services and activities see www.martingeddes.com.

October 7, 2005

Intelligence is harmful

From Bruce Schneier's security blog:

Turns out that you can jam cellphones with SMS messages. Text messages are transmitted on the same channel that is used to set up voice calls, so if you flood the network with one then the other can't happen. The researchers believe that sending 165 text messages a second is enough to disrupt all the cellphones in Manhattan.

Naturally, a stupid network would not suffer from such a performance bottleneck that can be exploited maliciously.

And IMS will keep you totally safe, 100% available, honest ;) No intelligent bottlenecks in this network! Move along please...

Posted by Martin Geddes at 2:35 PM
Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/588

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Intelligence is harmful:

» SMS Denial of Service Attack? from Communications
Bruce Schneier picked up on some work by a group at Penn State entitled Exploiting Open Functionality in SMS-Capable Cellular Networks. And Martin Geddes comments that this provides further proof that building intelligence into networks is harmful. Whi... [Read more]

Tracked on October 8, 2005 7:10 PM

» More coments on SMS Denial of Service from Dark Side Programming
Concerning the the DOS attack to GSM Networks, I just read a very good post on Brough Turner's Blog about this issue. I quote from the post: "Their full paper also cites six news articles which they assert represent occasions... [Read more]

Tracked on October 9, 2005 10:45 PM