Protecting the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols against Security and Privacy Attacks
Ankush Singla, Syed Rafiul Hussain, Omar Chowdhury, Elisa Bertino, Ninghui Li
Abstract
Abstract This paper focuses on protecting the cellular paging protocol — which balances between the quality-of-service and battery consumption of a device — against security and privacy attacks. Attacks against this protocol can have severe repercussions, for instance, allowing attacker to infer a victim’s location, leak a victim’s IMSI, and inject fabricated emergency alerts. To secure the protocol, we first identify the underlying design weaknesses enabling such attacks and then propose efficient and backward-compatible approaches to address these weaknesses. We also demonstrate the deployment feasibility of our enhanced paging protocol by implementing it on an open-source cellular protocol library and commodity hardware. Our evaluation demonstrates that the enhanced protocol can thwart attacks without incurring substantial overhead.