To Trust or Not to Trust
Robert Annessi, Joachim Fabini, Tanja Zseby · 2018
With the expected massive increase in high-bandwidth applications over 5G cellular networks, the efficient use of radio-network and core-network infrastructures becomes essential. Group communication is a method for transmitting data efficiently from one source to many receivers. In this paper we study the security provided in terms of authenticity and integrity for group communication in 5G networks. We identify that the current security solutions involve trusting the benignity and operational security of network operators as well as its users since the current security solutions do not provide data origin authentication. Based on this insight, we present two attack scenarios in which an adversary exploits the provided level of authenticity such that arbitrary data can be injected maliciously while receivers consider the data as if they were sent by the claimed source. We evaluate potential approaches to provide data origin authentication in 5G and show that future research is required for a general solution.