Re: [MEXT] Energy consumption attacks

Hi Julien,

MIPv6 is mostly about battery powered mobile hosts, so I think this topic
should be of interest to Mobile IPv6 community. Secondly, when you think
about solutions, you may realize that it is an IP layer problem. Any upper
layer host identifier (FQDN or SIP URI etc) would be resolved to the "fixed"
home address of the mobile host and once the attacker has learned it, the
attack is possible. The attacker can remotely consume the victim's energy.
Application layer solutions like spam filtering would be useless because the
attacker is simply sending bogus packets, not even opening sessions.

In fact, we may expand the problem space since there may be other problems
due to having a fixed MIPv6 home address. But I think the remote energy
consumption attack is the most serious one. Serious design efforts are being
made at MAC layer to enable energy conserving sleep mode. The attack would
not only foil these efforts, but also consume energy by "forcing" the victim
to reply to frequent malicious packets purportedly coming from random IP
addresses.

Thanks,

Pars

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Julien Laganier <[email protected]>wrote:

> Pars -
>
> How is this attack related to MIPv6?
>
> --julien
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 2:43 AM, Pars Mutaf <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I was wondering if solutions to energy consumption attacks on battery
> > powered mobile hosts would be of interest to IETF Mobile IPv6 community.
> >
> > The attack consists of sending frequent request packets e.g. SIP INVITE
> or
> > TCP SYN to a victim's home address.
> >
> > For example, experiments showed that the battery of a mobile phone with
> > 802.11 access can be remotely consumed in 3 hours (full battery). Attacks
> on
> > phones using an outdoor technology would result in more energy
> consumption
> > because of the longer distance to the base station.
> >
> > The victim becomes unusable.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Pars
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > MEXT mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mext
> >
> >
>

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