On the Efficacy of New Privacy Attacks against 5G AKA (original) (raw)
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A survey of subscription privacy on the 5G radio interface - The past, present and future
Journal of information security and applications, 2020
Abstract End-user privacy in mobile telephony systems is nowadays of great interest because of the envisaged hyper-connectivity and the potential of the unprecedented services (virtual reality, machine-type communication, vehicle-to-everything, IoT, etc.) being offered by the new 5G system. This paper reviews the state of subscription privacy in 5G systems. As the work on 5G Release 15 – the first full set of 5G standards – has recently been completed, this seems to be an appropriate occasion for such a review. The scope of the privacy study undertaken is limited to the wireless part of the 5G system which occurs between the service provider’s base station and the subscriber’s mobile phone. Although 5G offers better privacy guarantees than its predecessors, this work highlights that there still remain significant issues which need rectifying. We undertook an endeavor to (i) compile the privacy vulnerabilities that already existed in the previous mobile telephony generations. Thereafter, (ii) the privacy improvements offered by the recently finalized 5G standard were aggregated. Consequently, (iii) we were able to highlight privacy issues from previous generations that remain unresolved in 5G Release 15. For completeness, (iv) we also explore new privacy attacks which surfaced after the publication of the 5G standard. To address the identified privacy gaps, we also present future research directions in the form of proposed improvements.
Protecting the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols against Security and Privacy Attacks
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This paper focuses on protecting the cellular paging protocol — which balances between the quality-of-service and battery consumption of a device — against security and privacy attacks. Attacks against this protocol can have severe repercussions, for instance, allowing attacker to infer a victim’s location, leak a victim’s IMSI, and inject fabricated emergency alerts. To secure the protocol, we first identify the underlying design weaknesses enabling such attacks and then propose efficient and backward-compatible approaches to address these weaknesses. We also demonstrate the deployment feasibility of our enhanced paging protocol by implementing it on an open-source cellular protocol library and commodity hardware. Our evaluation demonstrates that the enhanced protocol can thwart attacks without incurring substantial overhead.
Towards Security and Privacy Preservation in 5G Networks
2021 29th Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR), 2022
The Fifth Generation (5G) networks support various service delivery models such as Device to Device (D2D) communication, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETS) among others. In these networks, massive personal and private data items are being exchanged among numerous heterogeneous devices. As such, security and privacy leaks can have devastating repercussions. Many protocols have been presented for device authentication, starting with Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) introduced by the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Numerous attacks have been described against this AKA protocol and hence other schemes have been presented in literature. Although they address some of these security and privacy issues, some of these schemes are inefficient while others are still susceptible to other attacks. In this paper, a protocol that protects the exchanged packets against ephemeral leakages, man-in-the-middle, impersonation and offline guessing attacks is presented. In terms of bandwidth requirements and execution time, the proposed protocol had the lowest values among its peers.
Defeating the Downgrade Attack on Identity Privacy in 5G
Security Standardisation Research, 2018
3GPP Release 15, the first 5G standard, includes protection of user identity privacy against IMSI catchers. These protection mechanisms are based on public key encryption. Despite this protection, IMSI catching is still possible in LTE networks which opens the possibility of a downgrade attack on user identity privacy, where a fake LTE base station obtains the identity of a 5G user equipment. We propose (i) to use an existing pseudonym-based solution to protect user identity privacy of 5G user equipment against IMSI catchers in LTE and (ii) to include a mechanism for updating LTE pseudonyms in the public key encryption based 5G identity privacy procedure. The latter helps to recover from a loss of synchronization of LTE pseudonyms. Using this mechanism, pseudonyms in the user equipment and home network are automatically synchronized when the user equipment connects to 5G. Our mechanisms utilize existing LTE and 3GPP Release 15 messages and require modifications only in the user equipment and home network in order to provide identity privacy. Additionally, lawful interception requires minor patching in the serving network.
Analysis of Security and Privacy in Mobile IP
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Improving security and privacy in current mobile systems
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As has been widely discussed, the GSM system only offers unilateral authentication of the mobile phone to the network; this limitation permits a range of attacks. While adding support for mutual authentication would be highly beneficial, changing the way GSM serving networks operate is not practical. The 3G and 4G mobile systems rectify the GSM weakness by providing mutual authentication between phone and network, and significantly improve their security properties by comparison with 2G (GSM). However, significant shortcomings remain with respect to user privacy, most notably the decades-old privacy problem of disclosure of the permanent subscriber identity (IMSI), a problem arising in all generations of mobile networks and that makes IMSI catchers a real threat. Although a number of possible modifications to 2G, 3G and 4G protocols have been proposed designed to provide greater user privacy, they all require significant alterations to the existing deployed infrastructures, which ar...
Identity Confidentiality in 5G Mobile Telephony Systems
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018
The 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recently proposed a standard for 5G telecommunications, containing an identity protection scheme meant to address the long-outstanding privacy problem of permanent subscriber-identity disclosure. The proposal is essentially two disjoint phases: an identication phase, followed by an establishment of security context between mobile subscribers and their service providers via symmetric-key based authenticated key agreement. Currently, 3GPP proposes to protect the identication phase with a public-key based solution, and while the current proposal is secure against a classical adversary, the same would not be true of a quantum adversary. 5G specications target very long-term deployment scenarios (well beyond the year 2030), therefore it is imperative that quantum-secure alternatives be part of the current specication. In this paper, we present such an alternative scheme for the problem of private identication protection. Our solution is compatible with the current 5G specications, depending mostly on cryptographic primitives already specied in 5G, adding minimal performance overhead and requiring minor changes in existing message structures. Finally, we provide a detailed formal security analysis of our solution in a novel security framework.
Another Look at Privacy Threats in 3G Mobile Telephony
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Arapinis et al. [1] have recently proposed modifications to the operation of 3G mobile phone security in order to address newly identified threats to user privacy. In this paper we critically examine these modifications. This analysis reveals that the proposed modifications are impractical in a variety of ways; not only are there security and implementation issues, but the necessary changes to the operation of the system are very significant and much greater than is envisaged. In fact, some of the privacy issues appear almost impossible to address without a complete redesign of the security system. The shortcomings of the proposed 'fixes' exist despite the fact that the modifications have been verified using a logic-based modeling tool, suggesting that such tools need to be used with great care.
User location tracking attacks for LTE networks using the interworking functionality
2016 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops, 2016
User location tracking attacks using cellular networks have been known since 2008. In 2014, several Signalling System No 7 (SS7) protocol based location tracking attacks were demonstrated, which particularly targeted the cellular roaming in GSM networks. Currently, the mobile network operators are in a gradual process of upgrading to Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, in addition to replacing SS7 by its successor-Diameter protocol. Though Diameter seems to be an improvement over SS7 in terms of security with the use of IPsec/TLS and certificate based authentication, they still need to communicate with their roaming partners who use less secure SS7. In this paper, we will briefly present the translation of existing SS7 attacks into Diameter-based attacks in LTE networks (under certain assumptions) using Interworking Functions(IWF)-which allows communication between networks that use different protocols. The key contribution of this paper is the the detailed explanation of novel attack vectors to obtain the user location information using IWF and hence, the proof that even new LTE network can be vulnerable to legacy attacks. Furthermore, we will outline some of the potential protection approaches for the attacks that we discuss.
IEEE Access
The security of mobile communication largely depends on the strength of the authentication key exchange protocol. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Group has standardized the 5G AKA (Authentication and Key Agreement) protocol for the next generation of mobile communications. It has been recently shown that the current version of this protocol still contains several weaknesses regarding user localization, leakage of activity, active attackers, and in the presence of malicious serving networks, leading to potentially major security leaks. We propose a new version of the 5G AKA protocol to overcome all the currently identified weaknesses in the protocol. In the new protocol, we replace the sequence numbers with random numbers, making it possible to drastically reduce the number of required communication phases and steps in the protocol. The usage of random numbers for the 5G AKA protocol is possible since the current Universal Subscriber Identity Modules (USIMs) are now capable of performing randomized asymmetric encryption operations. Moreover, the proposed protocol provides two additional security features, i.e., postcompromise security and forward security, not present in the current 5G AKA protocol. Finally, we evaluate the performance, both computation and communication efficiency, of the proposed AKA protocol and show its improvements compared to the current 5G AKA protocol.