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Penn State University Study Warns of Cell Phone Sabotage

Posted on: Friday, 7 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Anne Danahy, Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.

Oct. 6--UNIVERSITY PARK -- A group of researchers at Penn State has issued an ominous warning to the telecommunications industry: cell-phone networks used for text messaging, so crucial when emergency strikes, are susceptible to sabotage.

The study, which made national news, was one of the research projects featured Wednesday at Industry Day, an event put on by the Networking and Security Research Center in Penn State's department of computer science and engineering.

Two professors and two graduate students in the center started working on the study in January. They found that text messages sent via the Internet have the potential to jam cellular networks. Meaning, someone could use a search engine to generate accurate cell-phone numbers and then jam a system.

According to their research, it would take about 165 text messages a second to knock out cell-phone service in Manhattan.

Patrick Traynor, a doctoral student in computer science, compared the network to a six-lane expressway that only has one entry lane for text messages and phone lines.

"Once everyone gets on that expressway, everything is fine," he said. But while they're trying to squeeze into one lane, the potential for congestion exists, he said.

Traynor and William Enck, also a doctoral student in computer science, worked with Thomas La Porta, professor and director of the Networking and Security Research Center, and assistant professor Patrick McDaniel on the research.

McDaniel said in his presentation Wednesday that connecting the Internet to the infrastructure is "inherently dangerous."

"When you connect the Internet to critical infrastructure you import many of the problems that exist on the Internet into that critical infrastructure," he said.

"Eventually you're going to get to the point where somebody's going to exploit it," he said. "It could be on the electrical grid or the phone network or whatever."

The study went through the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and Federal Communications Commission before being released.

McDaniel also presented ways to address the problem, including reducing the number of entry points to the network, reducing connections between the Internet and the short messaging service (text messaging) and filtering traffic.

That research was one of the projects featured at Industry Day, which La Porta said gives industry representatives and faculty and students in the center a chance to share their ideas and get support for research.

About 50 students are in the center, which La Porta started a few years ago after working for Bell Laboratories for 16 years. Student and faculty research focuses on networking and security, such as viruses on the Internet or sensors that could be used in military operations.

La Porta said a central question is "How could some of these solutions be leveraged by industry?"

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Copyright (c) 2005, Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

LU,

Source: Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.)

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