A Silent SMS Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) is a popular mobile communications network. Short Message Service (SMS) is an easily adopted person-to-person communications technology for mobile devices. The GSM architecture allows for the insertion of mass application-generated SMS messages directly into the network infrastructure. In contrast, a mass continuous send of "Silent" SMS messages constitutes an invisible Denial of Service (DoS) attack on a mobile handset. Such a mobile handset DoS attack may be conducted for economic advantage to elude another party from communicating. This paper describes, from a technical perspective, how a silent application-generated denial of service (DoS) SMS attack is conducted.