Exploration of Attacks on Current Generation Smartphones

Due to the ever increasing capabilities of current generation smartphones, they are quickly becoming more attractive targets for malicious attackers. The potential of porting attacks and malware from modern computers to these mobile devices is becoming a reality. In this paper, we explore the possibility of staging some attacks on the 802.11 network interface which is common to all smartphones. We begin by explaining and carrying out the exploitation of the SSH vulnerability on jailbroken iPhones that was discovered in late 2009. This paper then looks at simple network flooding attacks with the intention of causing a simple denial of service by depleting the battery life of the device. It is also our intention to show that these flooding attacks can be carried out utilizing a smartphone as the aggressor in order to attack other mobile devices and that the procedure for such attacks is not difficult. A simple tool is developed in order to carry out these attacks and to show that even though these attacks are relatively simple, they can have profound effects.