GRCon21 - Defensive 5G

Presented by Eric Mair at GNU Radio Conference 2021 5G technology promises to deliver major advances in mobile broadband communications, IoT device density and reduced network latency. 5G is also the first telecommunications technology to solely use internet protocol (IP) as a means to transport traffic across its networks. The requirements for 5G have ushered in the need for cloud computing, SDN and SDR capabilities like never before. While previous wireless technologies have utilized a mix of special purpose hardware and software combined with commodity equipment, 5G can run completely on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software. While this can accelerate innovation, it can also rapidly expand the attack surface for malicious actors. In this work we developed a 4.5G/5G network using only COTS hardware and open-source software to serve as test-infrastructure for studying vulnerabilities in 5G networks. To achieve this, we are using software defined network (SDN) tools such as Faucet and Dovesnap and software defined radio capabilities such as Open5gs and srsRAN to facilitate the rapid and reliable setup and configuration of network topologies to represent the 5G network use-cases we intend to test. We are employing a red-team/blue-team approach to further validate vulnerabilities that we might uncover in the 5G networks that we study. https://events.gnuradio.org/event/8/