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Threat Modeling Framework for Mobile Communication Systems

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Threat Modeling Framework for Mobile Communication Systems Threat modeling framework for mobile communication systems Siddharth Prakash Rao Silke Holtmanns Tuomas Aura Aalto University Nokia-Bell Labs Aalto University Espoo, Finland Espoo, Finland Espoo, Finland siddharth:rao@aalto: silke:holtmanns@nokia-bell- tuomas:aura@aalto: labs:com ABSTRACT protocols, which evolved in a more open setup, security tools avail- Due to the complex nature of mobile communication systems, most able in the public domain for the laer are now used by hackers to of the security eorts in its domain are isolated and scaered across exploit the mobile networks [9]. underlying technologies. is has resulted in an obscure view of Despite the odds, mobile communication systems have under- the overall security. In this work, we aempt to x this problem gone a fair amount of scrutiny from the security research com- by proposing a domain-specic threat modeling framework. By munity. For example, internal components of a mobile device [71, gleaning from a diverse and large body of security literature, we 74, 101], radio communication between the phone and the cell systematically organize the aacks on mobile communications into towers[37, 162], and mobile core network protocols [55, 80, 122] various tactics and techniques. Our framework is designed to model have been tested for security-critical issues. All these isolated adversarial behavior in terms of its aack phases and to be used as research eorts are scaered across underlying protocols and tech- a common taxonomy matrix. We also provide concrete examples nologies, and, it has resulted in an obscure and complex view of mo- of using the framework for modeling the aacks individually and bile communication security. While some works have systematized comparing them with similar ones. and connected the isolated knowledge, e.g., telephony frauds [154], mobile device privacy [167], and authentication schemes [60], they CCS CONCEPTS still look at one specic problem or subsystem. Only a handful of research has taken holistic security into consideration [150]. We Security and privacy ! Security requirements; Mobile and wire- • extend this specic line of research of looking at mobile communi- less security; Networks ! Mobile networks; • cation threats as a whole rather than in separate parts. Despite its age and plethora of oensive security literature avail- KEYWORDS able, mobile communications do not have a domain-specic threat reat Modeling, Security framework, Mobile communication modeling framework. reat landscape studies and best practice guidelines by standardization and other governance bodies [25, 63] may use generic threat models, we argue that it is not sucient. 1 INTRODUCTION Also, the aacks are communicated mainly in the form of message sequence charts; while they are useful to communicate about a Reliance on mobile phones is continuously increasing for purposes single aack in detail, they do not provide much insight on captur- other than just making voice calls. More than half of the world ing adversarial behavior that is usually multi-parted. In this work, population now has a mobile subscription, and a vast majority of we x these shortcomings by proposing a domain-specic threat it comprises mobile Internet users [88]. While the newer genera- modeling framework that is built on the existing aacks literature tion of mobile technologies (5G) is slowly paving its way, mobile and can be used in parallel with the ongoing development of 5G coverage that relies on previous generations (2G, 3G, and 4G) has technology. We believe that our framework initiates a conversa- increased signicantly. It now leaves only 10% of the world popula- tion towards unifying prior knowledge and future eorts to secure tion outside the mobile networks coverage areas [87]. Furthermore, mobile communication networks. mobile Internet is now aordable to the population from low and middle-income countries [62], and it acts as the rst and only means Contributions— Our contributions from this work are as follows. arXiv:2005.05110v1 [cs.CR] 11 May 2020 of Internet access. In short, we are moving towards fast, reliable, We provide a comprehensive overview of dierent subsystems of and robust mobile connections. However, what is going at a snail mobile communications and identify various potential threat actors. pace is the security of mobile communications. is is because es- Based on a systematic methodology, we present the “Bhadra frame- tablishing reliable and faster connections has always been the goal work” that models the threats to mobile communication systems. In of mobile communications rather than achieving secure communi- this framework, we categorize publicly known aacks into 8 tactical cation. Security evolved in a closed environment where protocol categories and 47 techniques in total. We organize them further in standardization eorts oen require an industry aliation and so- terms of various phases of the aack life cycle, namely, mounting, ware components are proprietary. Up until recent years, network execution and results. We also show in detail, with concrete use security was achieved by restricting access only to a closed network cases, how to use our framework to capture adversarial behavior of trusted partners rather than using strong cryptographic building by modeling the aacks individually and to compare with similar blocks. Such practices have resulted in a lack of open source mod- ones. We also discuss the future directions in which our work can ules, tools to conduct audits, datasets about vulnerabilities, and, ourish with the help of the mobile communications security com- most importantly, lack of public knowledge. On the contrary, due munity. Our framework is agnostic to underlying technologies and to the gradual replacement of telephony protocols with IP-based aligned with MITRE ATT&CK, a popular framework for modeling enterprise IP systems [168]. Given that 5G networks involve drastic experts who exchange knowledge by participating in standards transitions from mobile-specic technologies to IP-specic ones, commiees, and other technical support personals who assist cus- we believe that the alignment of frameworks makes it easier in tomers with xing technical issues. ey share equal responsibili- terms of future eorts. ties for securing mobile communication systems altogether. Despite having in-depth technical knowledge required for their respective Structure— In Section 2, we describe our motivation for this work. roles, the main problem they currently face is the lack of a common We then give a high-level overview of mobile network topology, taxonomy and metrics to capture a high-level overview of the state including various subsystems and potential adversaries in Section 3. of security of the entire system. e company uses the MITRE In Section 4, we introduce the Bhadra framework, including the ATT&CK threat modeling framework [168, 169] on the enterprise methodology that we followed to categorize adversarial tactics and management side, and they believe a dedicated framework for mo- techniques. We discuss them further in detail in terms of aack bile communication systems that can co-exist with ATT&CK will mounting, execution and results in Sections 5, 6 and 7, respectively. be useful. We provide concrete use cases of our models in Section 8. We Due to the complex nature of the mobile communication systems, discuss the future directions and limitations of our work in Section 9. we also believe that the lack of a common taxonomy to commu- Finally, we conclude the paper with closing remarks in Section 10. nicate security-related issues is a generic problem amongst most of the companies working in this sector. ese companies heavily 2 MOTIVATION rely on the resources produced by the 3rd Generation Partnership reat modeling is an essential process in system designs to inte- Project (3GPP) in the form of normative technical specications (TS) grate security and to identify critical aspects of the system that and informative technical reports (TR). For example, series 33 [1] needs to be protected. It is an iterative process that involves den- and 35 [2] provide in-depth knowledge of individual subsystems, in ing security requirements as well as identifying and mitigating terms of how the underlying technology can be built securely. Other threats to reduce potential security risks systematically. ere are regulatory bodies such as the GSM Association (GSMA) [4] and the various generic threat modeling frameworks [164](e.g., STRIDE, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [45] also DREAD and PASTA), each with its own advantages and disadvan- produce security studies and guidelines that complements 3GPP’s tages [34, 160]. When applying such generic models to a specic eorts. ey also produce resources that discuss the summary of domain, it requires careful adaptation or combination with other aacks on mobile communication systems [25, 63, 65]. Although all threat models. For instance, STRIDE is intended for analyzing so- these resources provide a common taxonomy and aack categoriza- ware vulnerabilities, with access to the source code; however, it is tion of some sort to the companies in the mobile communication oen used for modeling threats, with customization, to distributed sector, they unfortunately cannot replace traditional threat models. systems. Adapting other generic frameworks becomes unmanage- Furthermore, both the technical specications and aack liter- able as a system grows mature and complicated. It requires its own ature use message sequence charts
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