The battery thing can be important. One strategy law enforcement uses is to force your phone into a high energy state and zap the battery very quickly.
They are expensive though...
- In order for most cellular protocols to work successfully, it's necessary for the transmission power level (phone to tower and tower to phone) to be lowest possible.
- So that tx power has to be constantly modulated because the phone's distance is always changing as it moves, meaning the optimum power level is always changing.
- The tower is in control of this - it tells the phone how powerful to transmit, and this can be done for each device.
- So I would suppose a malicious party in control of the tower could simply tell the phone to transmit at max power, which will drain batteries quickly, especially if the connection is being actively used I guess. This may have interference considerations but if the tower is really a box on top of a car or truck it may not really matter.
- I don't know how the phone is prevented from connecting to closer non-malicious towers.
As a denial of service attack?
constantly keeping the cell antenna and CPU awake would probably do it. it's a BIG part of why weak cell signal and lots of noise at e.g. conventions drains your phone many times faster than normal, even when you're not using it. you could probably do that just by sending junk data to everyone occasionally, or delaying valid data to prevent going into sleep modes for longer periods.
I think it has to do with the phone constantly renegotiating with cell towers along the route.
I've seen similar behaviour when a hurricane took out power to a local tower, and it was intermittently restored.
It might be possible to emulate that in a controlled environment/area.
If a phone isn’t connecting to any towers (like on a plane) it assumes it is out of range and is blasting out max power trying to find something to connect to. During hurricanes, many towers are down, which can overburden adjacent towers as well (since each tower only has a certain number of slots/channels it can handle). It means that you may not be able to communicate with your closest tower, since it is down, but you also may not be able to communicate with the next nearest tower, since it at capacity for current users, which puts you in a longer distance higher transmit power situation.
From what I have heard, those Stingrays act as fake towers, so I would assume they could set them to always tell the phones it needs max transmit power.
zap: 2 of 3; verb zapped; zapping; zaps
transitive verb 1a: *to get rid of*, destroy, or kill especially with or as if with sudden force
I was using the "to get rid of" portion of the definition.