Logic Gone Astray: A Security Analysis Framework for the Control Plane Protocols of 5G Basebands

We develop 5GBaseChecker—an efficient, scalable, and dynamic security analysis framework based on differential testing for analyzing 5G basebands’ control plane protocol interactions. 5GBaseChecker first captures basebands’ protocol behaviors as a finite state machine (FSM) through black-box automata learning. To facilitate efficient learning and improve scalability, 5GBaseChecker introduces novel hybrid and collaborative learning techniques. 5GBaseChecker then identifies input sequences for which the extracted FSMs provide deviating outputs. Finally, 5GBaseChecker leverages these deviations to efficiently identify the security properties from specifications and use those to triage if the deviations found in 5G basebands violate any properties. We evaluated 5GBaseChecker with 17 commercial 5G basebands and 2 open-source UE implementations and uncovered 22 implementation-level issues, including 13 exploitable vulnerabilities and 2 interoperability issues.

In the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium