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'SMS of Death' Could Crash Many Mobile Phones
space_in_your_face writes "Research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers. Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications, a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. The trick works for handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer."
Peace, at last !
No more stupid ring tones, no more boss (or wife) calls...
GREAT !
... how do I address this 'SMS of death' message to all the phones in my immediate vicinity?
Have gnu, will travel.
Lets crash all the world's mobile phones just because we know how to now.
Sending the "SMS of Death" has become common practice at theaters in order to finally force people's cell phones to stop ringing.
So this SMS of death, won't cause the handset to beat the user to death with his/her own shoes ? How bitterly dissapointing.
Ah the good ole days of AOL...
Sure, you might get a few hackers who do it for curiousity to a few numbers with a few types of phones, but eventually they'll get bored and move on to something else. Unless its easy to create binaries that can do something useful to a crim and its easy to send these binaries to ALL types of phones fast then criminal hacker types are unlikely to get involved since its far easier to earn money screwing around with PCs.
You can watch the talk over here: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4 or download it via torrent: http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4.torrent
1266953+17
I had a cheap Virgin Mobile, and if you looked at it funny it would crash.
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Fuck that site! They try and show you adverts before the article, then it is spread over multiple pages. I don't give a shit about how they are trying to make money, if you do it in annoying ways, people will work around it. So here is TFA. There was a link to a print version, but fuck knows if that will try and interrupt with more fucking adverts.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
"SMS of Death" Could Crash Many Mobile Phones
Phones don't have to be smart to be vulnerable.
By Erica Naone
The phones in many people's pockets today are miniature personal computers, and they are just as vulnerable as PCs to viruses, malware, and other security problems. But research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers.
Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications--messages that can be sent between mobile phones--a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries," that run on a phone. Network operators use these files to, for example, change the settings on a device remotely. The researchers used the same approach to attack phones. They performed their tricks on handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer.
A number of largely theoretical attacks aimed at iPhones and Android devices have made headlines over the past few years. But smart phones make up only 16 percent of the devices in use. So-called feature phones--which can do more than make calls but run only software with limited functionality, enabling their users to do such things as send text messages and play games--account for the majority of around 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide.
Feature phones are harder to attack than smart phones because of their limitations. Their processors are less powerful, and they have less memory capacity, so they must run simpler software, which often cannot be loaded unless the carrier gives permission. Feature phones also have more varied hardware and software idiosyncrasies than smart phones do.
The security researchers who presented their work at last week's conference, Collin Mulliner, a PhD student in the Security in Telecommunications department at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, and Nico Golde, an undergraduate student at the same institution, decided to attack feature phones over the air. They set up a miniature cellular network, using open-source software to create a base station with which to communicate with the phones. In order to broadcast malicious messages to them without putting other devices at risk, they shielded their communications by enclosing their network in a Faraday cage, which blocks radio signals.
Having a private cell network also helped Mulliner and Golde study the software running on low-end phones. By monitoring the way the phones communicated with their base station, they could discern important information about how the phones worked and how SMS messages could affect them.
The researchers were able to create malicious SMS messages for each type of phone they studied. The messages affect the phones without any response from the user. Because feature phones are so common, Mulliner says, such an attack "could take out a large percentage of mobile communications."
To target a specific user, an attacker would need to know what kind of phone he or she uses, since each platform requires a different message. But Mulliner says that attackers could easily knock out large numbers of phones by sending a set of five SMS messages--targeted to the five most popular models--to every device on a specific network. Mulliner notes that there are Internet-based services that send SMS messages en masse either cheaply or free, making it possible for an antagonist with limited resources to carry out such an attack from anywhere in the
Article didn't really make it clear. Does it render the phone useless enough to require a replacement, or can service be restored? If the former, it strikes me that a company could surreptitiously use this to try to force a customer into renewing their contract with a new phone?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Another pro for using Google Voice and blocking SMS on my cell
I was getting 404 errors following the original URL.
Corrected URL below:
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/27021/?p1=MstRcnt
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
it's a feature phone!
The article is really light on details, but what about these messages cause a phone to crash? Is the phone executing what is supposed to be textual data? Is this certain data just causing a buffer overflow somewhere? What is actually happening?
And people scoff at my 14 year old Qualcomm QCP-1900. I'd send them all an SMS of Death, if my phone could send text messages... (sigh) Still. Try defending yourself from a mugger with a Droid or iPhone - hah!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's not an SMS of death....merely an SMS of irritation.
An SMS of death would involve the recipient's head exploding. Literally.
A signal that could cause the Li-ion batteries to forcibly discharge at once might qualify, as well, but I wouldn't want to make that call. (pun intended)
What happens if you've blocked all incoming text messages (even from the provider)?
(Which subsequently produces meat-space spam to arrive I've found.)
http://www.supercars.net/gallery/132464/1542/873030.jpg
1.This post (and the linked-to article) make a great effort to hide the name of the "conference in Germany". $deity knows why, but the conference was the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3), organised by the Chaos Computer Club.
2.The "SMS of death" was not new in any way - it was well known and discussed back in 2008 at the 25C3. What the researchers effectively showed was that the manufacturers and the GSM networks had *still* not fixed the problem, even years later!
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
In practice, this is very rare because the carriers have known for a long time that binary payloads may be susceptible to misuse for malicious reasons. Thus, very few originators of short messages are permitted to send binary payloads (or at least when I was doing this a few years ago, maybe now it's different).
MMS
Motorola is WAY ahead of these guys. My Motorola CLIQ with "Blur" already shuts itself off randomly and for no evident reason. Who needs a hacker to remotely shut off your phone against your will when the feature is already built-in? :)
If the telcos really can't stop this you could make some good dough holding their network for ransom. They wire you some cash (not too much, it has to be much cheaper for them to pay, stay in the 5-digit range) or you bring all their phones down. During the ransom call (make sure you've got the guy on a wired phone) you demonstrate your attack on everyone in the office (not using the same source as the actual attack of course, probably best to use an untraceable prepaid or stolen SIM with a USB GSM adapter on a laptop (in a different location controlled via a wifi connection, NOT in your lap as you make the ransom call, which should be from a pay phone, and be sure to power down the GSM modem and destroy it after the attack) for your demonstration attack, and ideally you should avoid using the same exploit code that would be used in the real attack, in case they're able to do something to block the attacks fast enough).
Although in reality I don't see why it would be so hard to block all SMS messages containing binary executable data that doesn't come from an approved source, unless the packets are all so nondescript that they can't tell one of these messages from a piece of an MMS or something.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I used to be able to send an instant message over AOL that would cause the other user's CD-ROM drive to open. It was hilarious while it lasted. There were similar exploits that would boot them off the service.
My carrier gives you an email alias through which you can send a text message to the phone. Could you just crank out emails to every number on every carrier that does this?
Even the names of the old tools, Teardrop and Boink, would be suitable... good times
It might be highly amusing to expose people for the technocrack addicts that they are. Oh my god! My phone won't work, what ever shall I do?!? Let me just curl up into a ball under this park bench until its working again.
Anyone know what to put in the message? Just for research purposes....
Boss or wife? Boss and wife are same person.
Have you seen how teenagers text lately. I'd almost have a hard time figuring out if a legitimate text was binary or not...