Paper Info
Title
An advanced persistent threat in 3G networks: Attacking the home network from roaming networks
Abstract
The HLR/AuC is considered to be one of the most important network elements of a 3G network. It can serve up to five million subscribers and at least one transaction with HLR/AuC is required for every single phone call or data session. This paper presents experimental results and observations that can be exploited to perform a novel distributed denial of service attack in 3G networks that targets the availability of the HLR/AuC. More specifically, first we present an experiment in which we identified and proved some zero-day vulnerabilities of the 3G network that can be exploited by malicious actors to mount various attacks. For the purpose of our experiment, we have used off-the-shelf infrastructure and software, without any specialized modification. Based on the observations of the experiment, we reveal an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) in 3G networks that aims to flood an HLR/AuC of a mobile operator. We also prove that the discovered APT can be performed in a trivial manner using commodity hardware and software, which is widely and affordably available.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.cose.2013.11.006
Computers & Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
commodity hardware,service attack,important network element,data session,malicious actor,home network,million subscriber,mobile operator,roaming network,advanced persistent threat,off-the-shelf infrastructure,flooding,denial of service,umts,lte
Internet privacy,Advanced persistent threat,Denial-of-service attack,UMTS frequency bands,Computer science,Computer security,Computer network,Phone,Software,Network element,Database transaction,Roaming
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
40,
0167-4048
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
16
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christos Xenakis122128.00
Christoforos Ntantogian28613.03