Organizer
Partner Company
API wars in 5G networks
Shinjo Park, Altaf Shaik
Abstract
As the 5G mobile technology slowly proliferates all over the world, the operational nature of mobile networks migrates from traditionally closed to newly open interfaces. This upgrade comes with a raft of potential security exposures. The new interfaces that operators have set up to manage the most awaited totally connected society are riddled with security vulnerabilities.
This talk exposes the critical security risks of these new interfaces that enable industries to integrate their infrastructure with the latest mobile networks over standardized REST APIs. A massive new population of 5G-capable devices, from smart-city sensors to agriculture robots and beyond, are already part of this integration which can be compromised and hijacked just through a simple API access.
Our security investigations on hundreds of such APIs from 10 commercial service providers allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the network and take over the underlying IoT infrastructure.
We also demonstrate the powerful abilities of a future 5G attacker capable of extracting sensitive SIM information and sending malicious payloads to arbitrary devices on the network. We help to build the security considerations for the design and deployment of APIs in 5G networks.
Speaker Info
Shinjo Park
Dr. Shinjo Park is a telecommunication security solution designer at GSMK mbH. Before joining GSMK in 2022, he finished his doctoral studies in TU Berlin. His research work includes RAN security in offensive and defensive perspects, fake base stations, security analysis of cellular and IoT products ranging from consumer products to very specific telco equipments. Outside of his usual areas, he is interested in making software localized in Korean.
Altaf Shaik
Dr. Altaf Shaik is currently a senior researcher at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. He conducts research in telecommunications, esp., 6G, 5G radio access and core network security. He combines a professional background in programming, wireless communications and offensive network security. His renowned research exposed several vulnerabilities in the commercial 4G and 5G specifications and commercial networks that allow attackers to perform powerful attacks affecting millions of base stations, handsets, M2M and NB-IoT devices. Altaf is a frequent speaker at various prestigious international security conferences such as Black Hat USA & Europe, T2, SECT, Nullcon, Hardware.io and HITB and many others. His accomplishments landed him in the hall of fame of Google, Qualcomm, Huawei and GSMA. He also trains various companies and organizations in exploit development, and also building secure mobile n