Researchers Devise New Attacks Against 4G LTE Mobile Networks
A team of researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa have discovered 10 new attacks against the 4G LTE protocol, which could allow adversaries snoop on messages, deny service, and even track the location of users.
In a whitepaper, the team provides information on LTEInspector, the adversarial model-based testing approach they decided to adopt in this quest, and on the 10 new vulnerabilities they discovered in the protocol, alongside 9 previously known attacks.
LTEInspector, the researchers explain, was designed to analyze three critical procedures in the 4G LTE network, namely attach, detach, and paging. Designed to be tool-agnostic, the new approach can be “instantiated through any generic symbolic model checker and cryptographic protocol verifier,” the researchers say.
