Development of Signaling Spoofing Attacks Using Function Containerization of Rogue Base Stations

Development of Flexible Signaling Spoofing Attacks Using Function Containerization of Rogue Base Station
By applying Software-Defined Radio (SDR) technology, attackers could easily establish rogue Base Stations (BSs) to launch signaling spoofing, denial-of-service (DoS), or even Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in 4G LTE or 5G NR networks. However, the antenna capability of the rogue BSs limits the attack range and the effective results, and determines the possibility of being detected. In this proposal, we leverage a lightweight virtualization innovation, docker, to enable the containerization of radio access networks (RANs) and core networks (CNs) of rogue BSs, thereby realizing a large-scale signaling spoofing attack. In particular, we focus on the forgery of the signaling information blocks (SIBs), which is regarded as an essential broadcasting messages carrying fundamental instructions for a normal operation in 4G LTE networks.

In the proposed attacks, the victim will receive fake emergency alerts for panics or scam spreading, manipulated GPS information for wrong time synchronization, malicious black-list for disconnection, or fallacious power control message for battery depletion. Furthermore, we introduce Kubernetes to manage the developed attacks in the containers and to launch a cooperative attack in different geographic locations. We will demonstrate the proposed attack and show the negative effects it caused to the public.

Since the SIBs will be exploited to deliver operational information in 5G NR, the proposed SIB spoofing attacks could be easily implemented and realized, which of course will introduce severe damage to the 5G applications such as IoT. We also discuss the possible detection and protection approaches for the proposed SIB spoofing attack in 5G networks.

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Shin-Ming Cheng

Prof. Shin-Ming Cheng received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and information engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2000 and 2007, respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, from 2007 to 2012. Since 2012, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, where he is currently an associate professor. Since 2017, he has been with the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taipei, where he is currently a joint associate research fellow.

His current interests are secure mechanism design and security-related platform development in 4G/5G networks and IoT networks. Recently he investigates the robustness issue in machine learning. He received 2014 K. T. Li Young Researcher Award from ACM Taipei/Taiwan Chapter and IEEE PIMRC 2013 Best Paper Award, Since 2015, he served as the PI of the largest security education camp, AIS3, in Taiwan and trained almost 1000 students in these years.

Bing-Kai Hong

Bing-Kai Hong (Jed Hung) is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Information Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, with preparing his thesis on 5G network security. Since 2017, he started working at the Sentra Smart Technology Inc., where his position is the System Architect. Specialize in infrastructure deploy and security solutions at the networking, software, and cloud services in environments. In 2018, he is an intern member of the Communication Systems Department at EURECOM, who participated in many international group research and development open-source projects connected with a network protocol, security, virtualization, cloud computing, and programmable 5G network. The main contribution was done in the projects: “OpenAirInterface: The F1 CU-DU split”. As part of the project realization, he cooperated and coordinated work with other international EURECOM units, including France, the USA, China, Romania, Tunisia. Since 2019, he is a trainee member of the Cybersecurity Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. He participated in Cybersecurity group research and development projects connected with IoT security, IoT Firmware, and Malware analysis, virtualization, and programmable networks.