Volume 11 - Issue 3
Evaluating the Possibility to Perpetrate Tunneling Attacks Exploiting Short-Message-Service
- Sara Narteni
Institute of Electronics, Information Engineering and Telecommunications, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IEIIT), Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genoa, Italy
sara.narteni@ieiit.cnr.it
- Ivan Vaccari
Institute of Electronics, Information Engineering and Telecommunications, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IEIIT), Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genoa, Italy
- Maurizio Mongelli
Institute of Electronics, Information Engineering and Telecommunications, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IEIIT), Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genoa, Italy
- Maurizio Aiello
Institute of Electronics, Information Engineering and Telecommunications, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IEIIT), Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genoa, Italy
- Enrico Cambiaso
Institute of Electronics, Information Engineering and Telecommunications, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IEIIT), Via De Marini 6, 16149, Genoa, Italy
Keywords: cyber-security, covert channel, data exfiltration, cyber-attacks, sms
Abstract
In the cyber-security context, tunneling systems are exploited to bypass network restrictions to communicate
outside of the targeted perimeter, without being detected. Such attacks represent a serious
threat for the victim network, as they exploit legitimate protocols, encapsulating malicious payloads.
In this paper, we design a tunneling architecture based on Short-Message-Service (SMS) and evaluate
the possibility to adopt such communication medium for tunneling purposes. In order to evaluate
the feasibility to set up an efficient SMS tunneling system, we perform some simulations, by varying
both the payload size (from 10 Bytes to 1 MegaByte) and the SMS sending rate (up to 60 SMSs per
minute). Results allow us to model the performance of a tunneling system, in terms of sending time.
We derive indeed the underlying reference model through a mathematical analysis on the collected
data. Results show that overall performance increases for an SMS sending rate greater or equal to 10
SMSs per minute, regardless of the message size.