User-friendly Formal Methods for Security-aware Applications and Protocols

Formal support in the design and implementation of security-aware applications increases the assurance in the final artifact. Formal methods techniques work by setting a model that unambiguously defines attacker capabilities, protocol parties behavior, and expected security properties. Rigorous reasoning can be done on the model about the interaction of the external attacker with the protocol parties, assessing whether the security properties hold or not. Unfortunately, formal verification requires a high level of expertise to be used properly and, in complex systems, the model analysis requires an amount of resources (memory and time) that are not available with current technologies. The aim of this thesis is to propose new interfaces and methodologies that facilitate the usage of formal verification techniques applied to security-aware protocols and distributed applications. In particular, this thesis presents: (i) Spi2JavaGUI, a framework for the model-driven development of security protocols, that combines (for the first time in literature) an intuitive user interface, automated formal verification and code generation; (ii) a new methodology that enables the model-driven development and the automated formal analysis of distributed applications, which requires less resources and formal verification knowledge to complete the verification process, when compared to previous approaches; (iii) the formal verification of handover procedures defined by the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for mobile communication networks, including the results and all the translation rules from specification documents to formal models, that facilitates the application of formal verification to other parts of the standard in the future

You have been warned: Abusing 5G's Warning and Emergency Systems

The Public Warning System (PWS) is an essential part of cellular networks and a country's civil protection. Warnings can notify users of hazardous events (e.g., floods, earthquakes) and crucial national matters that require immediate attention. PWS attacks disseminating fake warnings or concealing precarious events can have a serious impact, causing fraud, panic, physical harm, or unrest to users within an affected area. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive investigation of PWS security in 5G networks. We demonstrate five practical attacks that may impact the security of 5G-based Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) as well as Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System (ETWS) alerts. Additional to identifying the vulnerabilities, we investigate two PWS spoofing and three PWS suppression attacks, with or without a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacker. We discover that MitM-based attacks have more severe impact than their non-MitM counterparts. Our PWS barring attack is an effective technique to eliminate legitimate warning messages. We perform a rigorous analysis of the roaming aspect of the PWS, incl. its potentially secure version, and report the implications of our attacks on other emergency features (e.g., 911 SIP calls). We discuss possible countermeasures and note that eradicating the attacks necessitates a scrupulous reevaluation of the PWS design and a secure implementation

A Console GRID Leveraged Authentication and Key Agreement Mechanism for LTE/SAE

Growing popularity of multimedia applications, pervasive connectivity, higher bandwidth, and euphoric technology penetration among bulk of the human race that happens to be cellular technology users, has fueled the adaptation to long-term evolution (LTE)/system architecture evolution. The LTE fulfills the resource demands of the next generation applications for now. We identify security issues in authentication mechanism used in LTE that without countermeasures might give super user rights to unauthorized users. The LTE uses static LTE key to derive the entire key hierarchy, i.e., LTE follows Evolved Packet System–Authentication and Key Agreement based authentication, which discloses user identity, location, and other personally identifiable information. To counter this, we propose a public key cryptosystem named “International mobile subscriber identity Protected Console Grid based Authentication and Key Agreement (IPG-AKA) protocol” to address the vulnerabilities related to weak key management. From the data obtained from threat modeling and simulation results, we claim that the IPG-AKA scheme not only improves security of authentication procedures, but also shows improvements in authentication loads and reduction in key generation time. The empirical results and qualitative analysis presented in this paper prove that IPG-AKA improves security in authentication procedure and performance in the LTE

Optimization of the methodology of configuration of mobile communication networks

The mobile communication network has been growing quickly, and the mobile network maintenance is becoming more complex, in performance, network coverage, energy, time consuming and expensive. The telecommunication service provider and mobile network telecommunication operator worries to what is the better methodology to optimizing a mobile network configuration and to improve the most efficient operation and functionality, to increase a superior performance in technical aspect (Create, and integrate new network planning in hardware and software level), economic aspect (cost reduction in maintenance) and environmental aspect (use of renewable energy through solar panels or wind power system). The work developed in this dissertation aims to propose an optimization of methodology of configuration of mobile communication network and build an automated configuration system in different technology (GSM, UMTS and LTE) to provide a good quality and improvement in its architecture to meet the requirement for a large number of services or application through distinct means transmission and using technology appropriate with a new generation of hardware to reach certain area in a Base Station Transmition (BTS) and a Radio Network Controller (RNC) that permit configure and integrated hardware and software issues in distinct networks technology (GSM, UMTS and LTE).A rede de comunicação móvel tem crescido rapidamente e ficando cada vez mais complexa, sendo cada vez mais complicado melhorar o desempenho, a cobertura, a eficiência energética e ao mesmo tempo aumentar o numero de utilizadores e serviços. O provedor de serviços de telecomunicações e a operadora de rede móvel têm de se preocupar em optimizar de forma a garantir a melhor configuração de rede móvel tendo em vista melhorar a operação e funcionalidade, a fim de esta ser mais eficiente, no seu desempenho. Relativamente aos aspectos técnicos (Criar novo planeamento e integrar a uma rede ao nível hardware e de software), aspecto econômico (redução de custo na manutenção) e aspecto ambiental (uso de energia renovável, quer através de painéis solares como de sistemas eólicos). O trabalho desenvolvido nesta dissertação visa propor uma otimização da metodologia de configuração das redes de comunicação móveis e construir um sistema de configuração automatizado em diferentes tecnologias (GSM, UMTS e LTE), para garantir os mais altos padrões de qualidade e atender a exigência de um grande número de serviços ou aplicações através de diferentes meios de transmissão e uso de tecnologia apropriada com uma nova geração de hardware para atingir determinada área em uma Estação de Transmissão de Base (BTS) e numa Rede de Controlador de Rádio (RNC) que permitem configurar e integrar diversos tipos de hardware e software em tecnologia de diferentes redes (GSM, UMTS e LTE)

A Survey of Subscription Privacy on the 5G Radio Interface - The Past, Present and Future

End-user privacy in mobile telephony systems is nowadays of great interest because of the envisaged hyper-connectivity and the potential of the unprecedented services (virtual reality, machine-type communication, vehicle-to-everything, IoT, etc.) being offered by the new 5G system. This paper reviews the state of subscription privacy in 5G systems. As the work on 5G Release 15 -- the first full set of 5G standards -- has recently been completed, this seems to be an appropriate occasion for such a review. The scope of the privacy study undertaken is limited to the wireless part of the 5G system which occurs between the service provider\u27s base station and the subscriber\u27s mobile phone. Although 5G offers better privacy guarantees than its predecessors, this work highlights that there still remain significant issues which need rectifying. We undertook an endeavor to (i) compile the privacy vulnerabilities that already existed in the previous mobile telephony generations. Thereafter, (ii) the privacy improvements offered by the recently finalized 5G standard were aggregated. Consequently, (iii) we were able to highlight privacy issues from previous generations that remain unresolved in 5G Release 15. For completeness, (iv) we also explore new privacy attacks which surfaced after the publication of the 5G standard. To address the identified privacy gaps, we also present future research directions in the form of proposed improvements

An intelligent network selection mechanism for vertical handover decision in vehicular Ad Hoc wireless networks

The design of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) technology is a modern paradigm for vehicular communication on movement. However, VANET's vertical handover (VHO) decision in seamless connectivity is a huge challenge caused by the network topology complexity and the large number of mobile nodes that affect the network traffic in terms of the data transmission and dissemination efficiency. Furthermore, the conventional scheme only uses a received signal strength as a metric value, which shows a lack of appropriate handover metrics that is more suitable in horizontal handover compared to VHO. Appropriate VHO decisions will result in an increase in the network quality of service (QoS) in terms of delay, latency, and packet loss. This study aims to design an intelligent network selection to minimize the handover delay and latency, and packet loss in the heterogeneous Vehicle-to- Infrastructure (V2I) wireless networks. The proposed intelligent network selection is known as the Adaptive Handover Decision (AHD) scheme that uses Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) algorithms, namely F-SAW scheme. The AHD scheme was designed to select the best-qualified access point (AP) and base station (BS) candidates without degrading the performance of ongoing applications. The F-SAW scheme is proposed to develop a handover triggering mechanism that generates multiple attributes parameters using the information context of vertical handover decision in the V2I heterogeneous wireless networks. This study uses a network simulator (NS-2) as the mobility traffic network and vehicular mobility traffic (VANETMobiSim) generator to implement a topology in a realistic VANET mobility scenario in Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and LTE networks technologies. The proposed AHD scheme shows an improvement in the QoS handover over the conventional (RSS-based) scheme with an average QoS increased of 21%, 20%, and 13% in delay, latency and packet loss, while Media Independent Handover based (MIH-based) scheme with 12.2%, 11%, and 7% respectively. The proposed scheme assists the mobile user in selecting the best available APs or BS during the vehicles’ movement without degrading the performance of ongoing applications

Security-centric analysis and performance investigation of IEEE 802.16 WiMAX

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