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As 5G networks become part of the critical infrastructures whose dysfunctions can cause severe damages to society, their security has been increasingly scrutinized. Recent works have revealed multiple specification-level flaws in 5G core networks but there are no easy solutions to patch the vulnerabilities in practice. Against this backdrop, this work proposes a unified framework called PROV5GC to detect and attribute various attacks that exploit these vulnerabilities in real-world 5G networks. PROV5GC tackles three technical challenges faced when deploying existing intrusion detection system (IDS) frameworks to protect 5G core networks, namely, message encryption, partial observability, and identity ephemerality. The key idea of PROV5GC is to use provenance graphs, which are constructed from the communication messages logged by various 5G core network functions. Based on these graphs, PROV5GC infers the original call flows to identify those with malicious intentions. We demonstrate how PROV5GC can be used to detect three different kinds of attacks, which aim to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability of 5G core networks. We build a prototype of PROV5GC and evaluate its execution performance on commodity cluster servers. We observe that due to stateless instrumentation, the logging overhead incurred to each network function is low. We also show that PROV5GC can be used to detect the three 5G-specific attacks with high accuracy. 

As 5G networks are gradually rolled out worldwide, it is important to ensure that their network infrastructures are resilient against malicious attacks. This work presents VET5G, a new virtual end-to-end testbed for 5G network security research experiments or training activities such as Capture-The-Flag competitions. The distinguishing features of VET5G include a home-grown 5G core network emulator written in Rust to ensure memory and thread safety, integration of OpenAirInterface’s Radio Access Network emulator and the official Android emulator to achieve full end-to-end 5G network emulation, inclusion of a reference P4 software switch to assist with prototyping of defense mechanisms for 5G data planes, implementation of Python APIs for easy 5G network experimentation, and adoption of JupyterHub to support multi-user experimentation. In our experiments we demonstrate how to use VET5G for two attack scenarios in 5G networks as well as its performance when it is used in a 5G hacking project for a Mobile Systems Security course.