skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: 5G NR Jamming, Spoofing, and Sniffing: Threat Assessment and Mitigation
In December 2017, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released the first set of specifications for 5G New Radio (NR), which is currently the most widely accepted 5G cellular standard. 5G NR is expected to replace LTE and previous generations of cellular technology over the next several years, providing higher throughput, lower latency, and a host of new features. Similar to LTE, the 5G NR physical layer consists of several physical channels and signals, most of which are vital to the operation of the network. Unfortunately, like for any wireless technology, disruption through radio jamming is possible. This paper investigates the extent to which 5G NR is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing, by analyzing the physical downlink and uplink control channels and signals. We identify the weakest links in the 5G NR frame, and propose mitigation strategies that should be taken into account during implementation of 5G NR chipsets and base stations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1642873
PAR ID:
10057394
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE International Conference on Communications workshops
ISSN:
2164-7038
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. The extremely high data rates provided by communications in the millimeter-length (mmWave) frequency bands can help address the unprecedented demands of next-generation wireless communications. However, atmospheric attenuation and high propagation loss severely limit the coverage of mmWave networks. To overcome these challenges, multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) provides beamforming capabilities and high-gain steer- able antennas to expand communication coverage at mmWave frequencies. The main contribution of this paper is the per- formance evaluation of mmWave communications on top of the recently released NR standard for 5G cellular networks. Furthermore, we compare the performance of NR with the 4G long-term evolution (LTE) standard on a highly realistic campus environment. We consider physical layer constraints such as transmit power, ambient noise, receiver noise figure, and practical antenna gain in both cases, and examine bitrate and area coverage as the criteria to benchmark the performance. We also show the impact of MIMO technology to improve the performance of the 5G NR cellular network. Our evaluation demonstrates that 5G NR provides on average 6.7 times bitrate improvement without remarkable coverage degradation. 
    more » « less
  2. Henderson, Thomas; Imputato, Pasquale; Liu, Yuchen; Gamess, Eric (Ed.)
    Physical (PHY) layer abstraction is an effective method to reduce the runtimes compared with link simulations but still accurately characterize the link performance. As a result, PHY layer abstraction for IEEE 802.11 WLAN and 3GPP LTE/5G has been widely configured in the network simulators such as ns-3, which achieve faster system-level simulations quantifying the network performance. Since the first publicly accessible 5G NR Sidelink (SL) link simulator has been recently developed, it provides a possibility of implementing the first PHY layer abstraction on 5G NR SL. This work deploys an efficient PHY layer abstraction method (i.e., EESM-log-SGN) for 5G NR SL based on the offline NR SL link simulation. The obtained layer abstraction which is further stored in ns-3 for use aims at the common 5G NR SL scenario of OFDM unicast single layer mapping in the context of Independent and Identically Distributed (i.i.d.) frequency-selective channels. We provide details about implementation, performance, and validation. 
    more » « less
  3. In this paper, we introduce a low-power wide-area cellular localization system, called LiTEfoot. The core architecture of the radio carefully applies non-linear transform of the entire cellular spectrum to obtain a systematic superimposition of the synchronization signals at the baseband. The system develops methods to simultaneously identify all the base stations that are active at any cellular band from the transformed signal. The radio front end uses a simple envelop detector to realize the non-linear transformation. We build on this low-power radio to implement a self-localization system leveraging ambient 4G-LTE signals. We show that the core system can also be extended to other cellular technologies like 5G-NR and NB-IoT. The prototype achieves a median localization error of 22 meters in urban areas and 50 meters in rural areas. It can sense a 3GHz wideband LTE spectrum in 10ms using non-linear intermodulation while consuming 0.9 mJ of energy for a PCB-based implementation and 40 𝜇J for CMOS simulation. In other words, LiTEfoot tags can last for 11 years on a coin cell while continuously estimating location every 5 seconds. We believe that LiTEfoot will have widespread implications in city-scale asset tracking and other location-based services. The radio architecture can be useful beyond low-power self-localization and can find application in synchronization and communication on battery-less platforms. 
    more » « less
  4. With the growing demand for locating services in a variety of commercial applications, positioning techniques have been considered as a vital part in cellular networks. With the evolution from 2G to 5G, the positioning techniques have been enhanced in various aspects. In this paper, we summarize the evolution of positioning standards in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and briefly introduce the new positioning standards in 5G NR (New Radio), which include new positioning requirements, the general positioning structure, new positioning reference signals, and general positioning methods. 
    more » « less
  5. 5G New Radio cellular networks are designed to provide high Quality of Service for application on wirelessly connected devices. However, changing conditions of the wireless last hop can degrade application performance, and the applications have no visibility into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). Most 5G network operators run closed networks, limiting the potential for co-design with the wider-area internet and user applications. This paper demonstrates NR-Scope, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that can passively measure fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information. Application servers can take advantage of the measurements to achieve better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We demonstrate the performance of NR-Scope by decoding the downlink control information (DCI) for downlink and uplink traffic of a 5G Standalone base station in real-time. 
    more » « less