Security News Breaking LTE on Layer Two

[upnorth]

Content source

https://alter-attack.net

Our security analysis of the mobile communication standard LTE ( Long-Term Evolution, also know as 4G) on the data link layer (so called layer two) has uncovered three novel attack vectors that enable different attacks against the protocol. On the one hand, we introduce two passive attacks that demonstrate an identity mapping attack and a method to perform website fingerprinting. On the other hand, we present an active cryptographic attack called aLTEr attack that allows an attacker to redirect network connections by performing DNS spoofing due to a specification flaw in the LTE standard. In the following, we provide an overview of the website fingerprinting and aLTE attack, and explain how we conducted them in our lab setup. Our work will appear at the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy and all details are available in a pre-print version of the paper.