New Research Multiple 5G Basebands Found with Security Vulnerabilities

TapTechNews August 8th news, at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference held in Las Vegas this Wednesday, a research team from Pennsylvania State University announced the latest research results, discovering a series of security vulnerabilities on multiple 5G basebands that can be used to monitor users.

Impact range

The research team custom-designed an analysis tool named 5GBaseChecker and found that the basebands produced by Samsung, MediaTek, and Qualcomm all have vulnerabilities, affecting mobile phone brands such as Google, OPPO, OnePlus, Motorola, and Samsung.

Research team

The research team members include KaiTu, YiluDong, AbdullahAlIshtiaq, SyedMdMukitRashid, WeixuanWang, TianweiWu, and SyedRafiulHussain. They released 5GBaseChecker on GitHub this Wednesday to enable other researchers to use this tool to find 5G vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability destructiveness

Assistant professor Hussain said that a fake base station can be created and then lured the mobile phones using the above basebands to connect, and then the mobile phone users can be monitored without the other party's knowledge.

Student Tu said: To some extent, these vulnerabilities completely break the 5G security mechanism, and this kind of monitoring can reach a silent level.

Tu said that network attackers can use these vulnerabilities to disguise as the victim's friends and send trusted phishing information; or guide the victim to click on a malicious website on the mobile phone; trick the victim into providing their credentials on a counterfeit Gmail or Facebook login page.

The researchers also said that the victim can be downgraded from 5G to an older protocol (such as 4G or older protocol) to make it easier to eavesdrop on the victim's communication.

Repair situation

The researchers said that most of the suppliers they contacted have repaired these vulnerabilities. As of the TapTechNews release, the researchers reported that 12 vulnerabilities in multiple 5G basebands have been repaired.

A Samsung spokesperson, ChrisLanglois, said in a statement that the company has released a software patch to the affected smartphone suppliers to handle and resolve this issue.

MediaTek and Qualcomm did not respond to the media's request for comment.

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