research-article

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UE Security Reloaded: Developing a 5G Standalone User-Side Security Testing Framework

Authors:

Evangelos Bitsikas,

Aanjhan Ranganathan,

Roger Piqueras Jover,

Christina PöpperAuthors Info & Claims

WiSec '23: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

Pages 121 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/3558482.3590194

Published: 28 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Security flaws and vulnerabilities in cellular networks lead to severe security threats given the data-plane services that are involved, from calls to messaging and Internet access. While the 5G Standalone (SA) system is currently being deployed worldwide, practical security testing of User Equipment (UE) has only been conducted and reported publicly for 4G/LTE and earlier network generations. In this paper, we develop and present the first open-source based security testing framework for 5G SA User Equipment. To that end, we modify the functionality of open-source suites (Open5GS and srsRAN) and develop a broad set of test cases for the 5G NAS and RRC layers. We apply our testing framework in a proof-of-concept manner to 5G SA mobile phones and provide detailed insights from our experiments. While being a framework in development, the results of our experiments presented in this paper can assist other researchers in the field and have the potential to improve 5G SA security.

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Cited By

Paci AChiacchia MBianchi G(2025)5GMap: Enabling external audits of access security and attach procedures in real-world cellular deploymentsComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2025.108091234(108091)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2025.108091
Tu KAl Ishtiaq ARashid SDong YWang WWu THussain SBalzarotti DXu W(2024)Logic gone astrayProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699072(3063-3080)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699072
Paci AChiacchia MBianchi G(2024)5GMap: User-Driven Audit of Access Security Configurations in Cellular Networks2024 19th Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services Conference (WONS)10.23919/WONS60642.2024.10449586(97-104)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/WONS60642.2024.10449586

Index Terms

UE Security Reloaded: Developing a 5G Standalone User-Side Security Testing Framework
1. Security and privacy
  1. Network security
    1. Mobile and wireless security

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cover image ACM Conferences

WiSec '23: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

May 2023

394 pages

ISBN:9781450398596

DOI:10.1145/3558482

General Chairs:
Ioana Boureanu
University of Surrey, United Kingdom
,
Steve Schneider
University of Surrey, United Kingdom
,
Program Chairs:
Bradley Reaves
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Nils Ole Tippenhauer
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 28 June 2023

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Abu Dhabi Award for Research Excellence

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WiSec '23

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WiSec '23: 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

May 29 - June 1, 2023

Guildford, United Kingdom

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Cited By

Paci AChiacchia MBianchi G(2025)5GMap: Enabling external audits of access security and attach procedures in real-world cellular deploymentsComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2025.108091234(108091)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2025.108091
Tu KAl Ishtiaq ARashid SDong YWang WWu THussain SBalzarotti DXu W(2024)Logic gone astrayProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699072(3063-3080)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699072
Paci AChiacchia MBianchi G(2024)5GMap: User-Driven Audit of Access Security Configurations in Cellular Networks2024 19th Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services Conference (WONS)10.23919/WONS60642.2024.10449586(97-104)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/WONS60642.2024.10449586
Khandker SGuerra MBitsikas EJover RRanganathan APöpper CKim YKim JKoushanfar FRasmussen K(2024)ASTRA-5G: Automated Over-the-Air Security Testing and Research Architecture for 5G SA DevicesProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3643833.3656141(89-100)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643833.3656141
Thorn SEnglish KButler KEnck WKim YKim JKoushanfar FRasmussen K(2024)5GAC-Analyzer: Identifying Over-Privilege Between 5G Core Network FunctionsProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3643833.3656134(66-77)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643833.3656134
Pacherkar HYan GKim YKim JKoushanfar FRasmussen K(2024)PROV5GC: Hardening 5G Core Network Security with Attack Detection and Attribution Based on Provenance GraphsProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks10.1145/3643833.3656129(254-264)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643833.3656129
Tripathi A(2024)Security Framework for Non-public 5G Network DeploymentsProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking10.1145/3631461.3632513(248-249)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631461.3632513

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