Critical security review and study of DDoS attacks on LTE mobile network

Mobile network is currently evolving into data centric architecture. Long Term Evolution (LTE) based next generation 4G technology is being deployed by cellular operators around the globe. LTE supports all-IP based data, voice and streaming network with speeds in the order of hundreds of megabits per seconds. Increased speed in accessing Internet and other advanced services exposes mobile data network to be attacked by hackers using spyware, malware, phishing and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which were predominantly affecting Internet-only datacentres in the past. This paper presents a detailed review of security framework and authentication procedures built into the LTE system architecture evolution (SAE). A brief summary of DDoS attacks and security vulnerabilities in LTE network included. This paper reviews the diameter interface and associated security problems using it in LTE network. This paper proposes using explicit-congestion notification (ECN) based method to address congestion issues in diameter interface.