Debilities of the UMTS Security Mode Set-Up Procedure and Attacks against UMTS/HSPA Device

A study and identification of vulnerabilities during the set-up procedure of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and how some of them can be exploited. For accomplishment a good understanding of the security messages exchange, a part of UMTS architecture is developed firstly. After the explanation of the security mode set-up procedure debilities, the chapter identify attacks that take advantage of the fact that some messages during their exchange in the process are not protected. The attacks indicated in the chapter are mostly of Denial of Service (DoS) kind, and mainly are performed with a rogue BTS.