{"id":251119,"date":"2018-03-05T08:30:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T06:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=251119"},"modified":"2018-03-05T08:32:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T06:32:42","slug":"security-problems-with-4g-lte-allow-snooping-on-messages-and-calls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/251119-security-problems-with-4g-lte-allow-snooping-on-messages-and-calls.html","title":{"rendered":"Security problems with 4G LTE allow snooping on messages and calls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Security researchers have uncovered potential design flaws<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0in the 4G LTE protocol.<\/p>\n

They investigated the security and privacy of the three critical procedures of the protocol – attach, detach, and paging.<\/p>\n

For exposing vulnerabilities, they proposed a model-based testing approach “LTEInspector”. This combines a symbolic model checker and a cryptographic protocol verifier in the symbolic attacker model.<\/p>\n

Using LTEInspector, the researchers uncovered 10 new attacks along with 9 prior attacks – categorised into three classes – security, user privacy, and disruption of service.<\/p>\n

\u201cNotable among our findings is the authentication relay attack that enables an adversary to spoof the location of a legitimate user to the core network without possessing appropriate credentials,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

To ensure the exposed attacks pose real threats, they validated eight of the 10 attacks and their accompanying adversarial assumptions through experimentation in a testbed.<\/p>\n

In layman\u2019s terms, the design flaws of the 4G LTE protocol allow attackers to:<\/p>\n