A methodology for testing battery deprivation denial of service attacks in mobile phones

Unlike confidentiality and privacy concerns, the preservation of mobile phone service availability has not received the same attention from researchers, albeit an important factor, especially in business but also in life threatening situations. In this paper we present a methodology for testing practical battery deprivation denial of service attacks in mobile phones. We focus on attacks against the mobile terminal and not against the network. A variety of scenarios is proposed encompassing stealth Short Message Service messages (SMS), as well as very short calls interrupted before the phone actually rings. Both techniques are invisible to the target under attack and force the mobile phone to continuously transmit, consuming energy up to the point of complete battery depletion. Current flow and thus power consumption can be measured using a hardware based logger while a thermal camera can further measure the rise in temperature. Preliminary results show that it is trivially easy to launch an effective denial of service attack, with minimal cost and resources.