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Title: Protecting the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols against Security and Privacy Attacks
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1719369
NSF-PAR ID:
10157818
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Volume:
2020
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2299-0984
Page Range / eLocation ID:
126 to 142
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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