NDSS 2019 Privacy Attacks to the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols Using Side Channel Information
SESSION 5B-5 Privacy Attacks to the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols Using Side Channel Information
The cellular paging (broadcast) protocol strives to the balance between a cellular device's energy consumption and quality-of-service by allowing the device to only periodically poll for pending services in its idle, low-power state. For a given cellular device and serving network, the exact time periods when the device polls for services (called the paging occasion*) are fixed by design in the 4G/5G cellular protocol. In this paper, we show that the fixed nature of paging occasions can be exploited by an adversary in the vicinity of a victim to associate the victim's soft-identity (e.g., phone number, Twitter handle) with its paging occasion, with only a modest cost, through an attack dubbed $mathsf{ToRPEDO}$. Consequently, $mathsf{ToRPEDO}$ can enable an adversary to verify a victim's coarse-grained location information, inject fabricated paging messages, and mount denial-of-service attacks. We also demonstrate that, in 4G and 5G, it is plausible for an adversary to retrieve a victim device's persistent identity (i.e., IMSI) with a brute-force $mathsf{IMSI-Cracking}$ attack while using $mathsf{ToRPEDO}$ as an attack sub-step. Our further investigation on 4G paging protocol deployments also identified an *implementation oversight of several network providers which enables the adversary to launch an attack, named $mathsf{PIERCER}$, for associating a victim's phone number with its IMSI; subsequently allowing targeted user location tracking. All of our attacks have been validated and evaluated in the wild using commodity hardware and software. We finally discuss potential countermeasures against the presented attacks.
PAPER
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-con...
SLIDES
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-con...
AUTHORS
Syed Rafiul Hussain (Purdue University)
Mitziu Echeverria (University of Iowa)
Omar Chowdhury (University of Iowa)
Ninghui Li (Purdue University)
Elisa Bertino (Purdue University)
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2019, 24-27 February 2019, Catamaran Resort Hotel & Spa in San Diego, California.
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-p...
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