Denial-of-service Attack Scenarios and their Behaviour on 5G New Generation Networks

Abstract

The boost in data throughput and a decrease in communication latency of the fifth generation new radio (5G NR), the next generation of wireless communications, will change the way the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are used. The number of IoT connected devices on the network will increase exponentially so will the attack surface of these devices. Most of these IoT devices have not been built with security in mind which makes them easy targets for different kinds of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Hence, the security of the fifth generation (5G) networks is a rich and upcoming research field.

The goal of this thesis is to protect availability of 5G networks from DoS. To study the impact of DoS on 5G networks, we derive meaningful attack scenarios that can exploit the vulnerabilities of the network and disable a 5G network. Understanding these attack scenarios eventually will lead to building better defence solutions against these attacks. We hope our efforts in identifying these attack patterns can help other security or telecommunication researchers in their work.

We utilize the millimeter wave module of NS3 simulator to implement our attack scenarios. Some deviation in the results can be expected between different simulators or a real network due to differences in the way they are implemented. However, the main idea behind the attack scenarios will still be valid across all the implementations. DoS has been discussed in a few papers with respect to 4G networks and we discuss them in detail in the related work section of our thesis.

We derive five different potential DoS attack scenarios that might be possible against the 5G base band systems. When designing the scenarios we try to cover different areas of the 5G network. First scenario is designed to observe the performance impact of base stations due to an ongoing attack. Second and third scenarios concentrate on uplink channels and fourth scenario tries to utilize the downlink channel. Finally, the fifth scenario concentrates on exhausting the computation resources of base band. All these attack scenarios except the fifth one are then implemented on NS3 simulator so their impact can be studied more efficiently. Due to limitation in the NS3 simulator the fifth scenario could not be realized. We observe that all the implemented scenarios have an impact on the efficiency of the 5G base band in some way or the other.