Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa have discovered flaws in the 4G and 5G networks which allows hacker access to phone calls and location data.
In the latest blow to mobile security, the researchers Syed Refiul Huassian, Ninghui Li and Elisa Bertino at Purdue University, and Mitziu Echeverria and Omar Chowdhury at the University of Iowa have revealed their findings of a combination of vulnerabilities in virtually all 4G and 5G networks at the Sandiego ‘Network and Distributed System Security Symposium'.
Their paper details two avenues for attack, the first of which has been named ‘Torpedo' and exploits a weakness in the network's paging protocol used to alert a connected device to a call or text before it is received. The researchers discovered that a sequence of quickly cancelled calls can trigger a paging message without alerting the device to an incoming call, and that call may then be utilised to track the victim's paging location.
If tracking wasn't bad enough, access to a paging address allows the hacker to commandeer the paging channel and thus inject their own and/or block incoming messages, and also makes the other two hacks the researchers found possible: ‘Piercer' and ‘IMSI-Cracking'.
Piercer allows attackers to ascertain an ‘International Mobile Subscriber Identity' (IMSI) on the 4G network, and then IMSI-Cracking can then brute-force the encrypted IMSI number for both the 4G and 5G networks.
These severe vulnerabilities affect all devices on the 4G and 5G networks – so every phone of the last decade – and opens them to ‘Sting Ray' real-time location and call tracking.
The researchers claim these hacks can be achieved through hardware costing as little as $200, so haven't released any programmatic proof lest the attack vectors actually be used to put public safety and security at risk.
Hussain told TechCrunch that Torpedo and IMSI-Cracking flaws must be fixed by the GSMA (mobile operations industry representative body), who have been notified of the insecurities, but the Piercer flaw can only be fixed by network carriers.
It's disappointing to see the brand new and supposedly far more secure 5G networks already struck down with such serious issues.
Source: TechCrunch
