Mobile telecommunications have seen a rapid development in recent years and as we continue moving towards an era of intelligent connectivity, we are building ever more complex networks, both in the services they offer, in the use cases they will enable and the range of technology used to build them. Such networks are already critical to both economic and society at large however they are also becoming attractive to attackers. With the continued presence of legacy mobile network technologies (such as 2G and 3G), the continued presence of 4G and the emergence of next-generation 5G networks, the ‘threat surface’ is increasing. Meanwhile the traditional threats and vulnerabilities of legacy networks have to be continually mitigated and managed.
In this talk, we shall go through the evolution of mobile networks starting from the 2G (GSM) network and onto the recently deployed 5G network. We will elaborate on the mobile network architectures, technology, principle of operation, security mechanisms, vulnerabilities and countermeasures including industry best practices. Finally, we shall delve into the proliferation of IMSI catchers, which are a ‘clear and present danger’ to our privacy and discuss a novel mobile network operator (MNO) based technique to ‘catch the catchers’ and protect its subscribers from such devices.
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