Related papers: Defeating the Downgrade Attack on Identity Privacy…
Subscription privacy of a user has been a historical concern with all the previous generation mobile networks, namely, GSM, UMTS,and LTE. While a little improvement have been achieved in securing the privacy of the long-term identity of a…
The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released its first 5G security specifications in March 2018. This paper reviews the 5G security architecture, requirements and main processes and evaluates them in the context of known and new…
Ensuring user privacy remains a critical concern within mobile cellular networks, particularly given the proliferation of interconnected devices and services. In fact, a lot of user privacy issues have been raised in 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE…
IMSI catchers have been a long standing and serious privacy problem in pre-5G mobile networks. To tackle this, 3GPP introduced the Subscription Concealed Identifier (SUCI) and other countermeasures in 5G. In this paper, we analyze the new…
Although the security properties of 3G and 4G mobile networks have significantly improved by comparison with 2G (GSM), significant shortcomings remain with respect to user privacy. A number of possible modifications to 2G, 3G and 4G…
Device identifiers like the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) are crucial for ensuring device integrity and meeting regulations in 4G and 5G networks. However, sharing these identifiers with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs)…
IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catchers, also known as "Stingrays" or "cell site simulators," are rogue devices that pose a significant threat to cellular network security [1]. IMSI catchers can intercept and manipulate…
IMSI Catchers are tracking devices that break the privacy of the subscribers of mobile access networks, with disruptive effects to both the communication services and the trust and credibility of mobile network operators. Recently, we…
Ensuring user privacy remains critical in mobile networks, particularly with the rise of connected devices and denser 5G infrastructure. Privacy concerns have persisted across 2G, 3G, and 4G/LTE networks. Recognizing these concerns, the 3rd…
Lawful Interception (LI) is a legal obligation of Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to provide interception capabilities to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in order to gain insightful data from network communications for criminal…
In password-based authentication systems, the username fields are essentially unprotected, while the password fields are susceptible to attacks. In this article, we shift our research focus from traditional authentication paradigm to the…
The lack of authentication during the initial bootstrapping phase between cellular devices and base stations allows attackers to deploy fake base stations and send malicious messages to the devices. These attacks have been a long-existing…
As 5G networks become more mainstream, privacy has come to the forefront of end users. More scrutiny has been shown to previous generation cellular technologies such as 3G and 4G on how they handle sensitive metadata transmitted from an end…
Anonymous access authentication schemes provide users with massive application services while protecting the privacy of users' identities. The identity protection schemes in 3G and 4G are not suitable for 5G anonymous access authentication…
We introduce LTrack, a new tracking attack on LTE that allows an attacker to stealthily extract user devices' locations and permanent identifiers (IMSI). To remain stealthy, the localization of devices in LTrack is fully passive, relying on…
Identity Management Systems (IdMs) have complemented how users are identified, authenticated, and authorised on e-services. Among the methods used for this purpose are traditional IdMs (isolated, centralised and federated) that mostly rely…
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of existing authentication and privacy-preserving schemes for 4G and 5G cellular networks. We start by providing an overview of existing surveys that deal with 4G and 5G communications,…
We study the 5G-AKA authentication protocol described in the 5G mobile communication standards. This version of AKA tries to achieve a better privacy than the 3G and 4G versions through the use of asymmetric randomized encryption.…
5G presents numerous advantages compared to previous generations: improved throughput, lower latency, and improved privacy protection for subscribers. Attacks against 5G standalone (SA) commonly use fake base stations (FBS), which need to…
As 3GPP systems have strengthened security at the upper layers of the cellular stack, plaintext PHY and MAC layers have remained relatively understudied, though interest in them is growing. In this work, we explore lower-layer exploitation…