Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design have come up with a discovery of vulnerabilities in the firmware implementation of 5G mobile network modems from major chipset vendors. The flaws impact prominent vendors, including MediaTek and Qualcomm.
Several 5G commercial products, such as smartphones, CPE routers, and USB modems, may be impacted. The vulnerabilities affect 5G modems, 10 issues impact Qualcomm and MediaTek, and three of them are rated high severity.
Threat actors can exploit the vulnerabilities to block connections, freeze connections that force the manual reboot or downgrade the 5G connectivity to 4G.
The attacks rely on a model that mimics a limited Dolev-Yao adversary. The attackers attempt to deceive a 5G-enabled target device to connect a rogue base station (gNB). This is achieved by revealing an Adversary-Controlled downlink channel, enabling the injection and modification of 5G NR Downlink packets from an actual 5G stack implementation using OpenAirInterface (gNB) and Open5GS (5G Core Network).
Through by exposing an Adversary-Controlled Downlink channel that can arbitrarily inject and/or modify 5G NR Downlink Packets generated from a real 5G stack implementation based on OpenAirInterface (gNB) and Open5GS (5G Core Network) this can be achieved.
By impersonating the legitimate gNB using the known Cell Tower connection parameters, the attackers have to achieve their motto. Free software like Cellular-Pro allows it. Even the attacker does not need to be aware of any secret information of the target UE, such as UE’s SIM card details, to complete the NAS network registration.
The attacker must be sufficiently close to the target UE, and the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of the adversarial gNB is higher than the legitimate gNB. The target device will connect to the adversarial gNB. The adversarial gNB can freely manipulate downlink messages to the target UE throughout the message exchanges.
These vulnerabilities impact 714 smartphones from 24 vendors, including Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Apple, and Google.
Below is the list of vulnerable targets used in the tests by the researchers and their firmware versions:
The following table includes the list of 5G implementation vulnerabilities and affected software or products:
At the time of publishing the report, both MediaTek and Qualcomm have already released security updates to address 12 of the 14 vulnerabilities. The patches for the other two flaws are expected to be disclosed in the future.
Article Reference : Security Affairs
