Wanted to do a post about: Vulnerabilities and security issues and requirements in 5G📡 as well as share some cool articles about the topic. This post is in two parts because it's a long one.
To some people it seems far away the arrival of these networks, although this is far from it.
In many regions especially in EU or China already actively use 5G (and according to the forecasts 6G is not far off about it and its security will be a post in the future) . And 5G is actively used, they will want to hack it.
About it we will talk more exactly about attacks and security.5G is more secure than its predecessors, at least that was the idea.
The 5G itself originally had two implementations NSA and SA.
NSA- implementation works on the basis of the core of the last 4G generation network.On this may have the vulnerabilities of the previous generation. Nevertheless, in practice, it is much easier to implement.
SA in turn "native 5G" that is, it has a native 5GC core.And it will not have the vulnerabilities of other generations cores. But it is much harder to implement.
But let's look at the vulnerabilities and possible attacks on 5G.🔭
1)
Network Configuration Manipulation :
Poisoning the routing table, manipulating DNS, or tampering with cryptographic keys and policies. These attacks target AMF, DNS server or PCF.When viewed from the EPC perspective, attacks will target MME and PCRF.
To mitigate these attacks it is possible to e.g. decrease user privileges.With regards to DNS manipulation, DNSSEC can be used to mitigate attacks.
DNSSEC provides a public key to verify the result of a DNS query.2)
Malware: Software attacks on CN can lead to inaccessibility of services or destruction of information.
To protect against these attacks I think the best I can suggest is to
update your technology, test your network for vulnerabilities, and of course do backups🙃
3) Hardware manipulation: Physical hardware attacks, more accurately these are sidelink attacks. A side-channel attack uses current measurements from a given device to process or receive data.
Since this attack works through third-party channels, it is a physical attack, i.e. it is usually harder to do .
Defending against these attacks usually requires special equipment. To protect against such attacks, power consumption can be equalized for peaks/anomalies for specially designed equipment.
TPM would also be a simple and good solution for this.4)
Information leakage: Unauthorized access to user data, cryptographic keys and logs that are leaked. These types of attacks will target SMF.
Countermeasures could be to
implement tunnel encryption with IPsec to ensure
confidentiality and integrity of IP packets.
5) Authentication abuse: The result of integrity violations, privilege escalation. Such attacks can target AMF and AKA, which is a request/response protocol based on SQN.
To prevent this attack, it is suggested that the concealment mechanism uses symmetric encryption .6)
Some random bugs and human error: Even a well designed and secured network cannot be 100% reliable. For example the wrong settings may lead to security breaches or any other human error.
To mitigate these types of bugs, you need to a
utomate the human aspect or introduce commit checking and monitoring.
#5g #network #mobile #attacks #protection