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Noncompliance as Deviant Behavior: An Automated Black-box Noncompliance Checker for 4G LTE Cellular Devices

Published: 13 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The paper focuses on developing an automated black-box testing approach called DIKEUE that checks 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) control-plane protocol implementations in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) cellular devices (also, User Equipments or UEs) for noncompliance with the standard. Unlike prior noncompliance checking approaches which rely on property-guided testing, DIKEUE adopts a property-agnostic, differential testing approach, which leverages the existence of many different control-plane protocol implementations in COTS UEs. DIKEUE uses deviant behavior observed during differential analysis of pairwise COTS UEs as a proxy for identifying noncompliance instances. For deviant behavior identification, DIKEUE first uses black-box automata learning, specialized for 4G LTE control-plane protocols, to extract input-output finite state machine (FSM) for a given UE. It then reduces the identification of deviant behavior in two extracted FSMs as a model checking problem. We applied DIKEUE in checking noncompliance in 14 COTS UEs from 5 vendors and identified 15 new deviant behavior as well as 2 previous implementation issues. Among them, 11 are exploitable whereas 3 can cause potential interoperability issues.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (CCS21-fp595.mp4)
Noncompliance as deviant behavior: an automated black-box noncompliance checker for 4G LTE cellular devices - presentation video, CCS 2021.

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  1. Noncompliance as Deviant Behavior: An Automated Black-box Noncompliance Checker for 4G LTE Cellular Devices

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CCS '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
      November 2021
      3558 pages
      ISBN:9781450384544
      DOI:10.1145/3460120
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      Published: 13 November 2021

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      Author Tags

      1. 4G
      2. LTE
      3. attacks
      4. cellular network
      5. model learning
      6. vulnerabilities

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      November 15 - 19, 2021
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