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4G LTE Pried Open To Reveal A Slew Of New Protocol-Level Attacks

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 06 2018, @03:44PM   
from the good-protocols-gone-bad dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A group of American university researchers have broken key 4G LTE protocols to generate fake messages, snoop on users, and forge user location data.

Those working on the coming 5G protocols should take note: the vulnerabilities are most worrying because they're written into the LTE protocols, and could therefore have an industry-wide impact.

Identified by Purdue University's Syed Rafiul Hussain, Shagufta Mehnaz and Elisa Bertino with the University of Iowa's Omar Chowdhury, the protocol procedures affected are:

• Attach – the procedure that associates a subscriber device with the network (for example, when you switch the phone on);
• Detach – occurs when you switch your device off, or if the network disconnects from the device (for example because of poor signal quality, or because the phone can't authenticate to the network); and
• Paging – this protocol is part of call setup, to force the device to re-acquire system information, and in emergency warning applications.

The researchers' paper (PDF) describes an attack tool called LTEInspector, which the researchers said found exploitable vulnerabilities that resulted in "10 new attacks and nine prior attacks” (detecting old vulnerabilities helped the researchers validate that the new vulns were genuine).

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Original Submission

• Large-scale Cellular Networks are the problem. Large-scale Cellular Networks are the problem. (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @04:03PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @04:03PM (#648536)

  We need to get back to basics: A network of simple, standardized access points.

  When your wireless network depends on beaming signals over large distances, then you need to be a large corporation to be able to maintain it and to comply with the rules of some kind of local VIM. That means proprietary protocols, which means feature complexity for the sake of market differentiation.

  That's a stupid way to do it.

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• 802.1X plus crypto agnostic WPA. (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @06:01PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @06:01PM (#648595)

  That would handle connect/disconnect events and secure encryption of the data line.

  But the truth is: They don't *WANT* these protocols secure. Government agencies need to ensure they can compromise specific cell phones at any time. Securing the network so only the cell phone and its service provider (not the network provider) can intercept transmissions would be very concerning for them.

  At this point in time all standards need to be scrutinized heavily, because government agencies and their agents are working hard to compromise standards in ways nation states can utilize while locking down hardware and standards in way normal citizens cannot.

  Parent