학술논문

Dissecting Operational Cellular IoT Service Security: Attacks and Defenses
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on. 32(2):1229-1244 Apr, 2024
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Internet of Things
Security
IP networks
Unsolicited e-mail
Batteries
Logic gates
Computer science
Cellular IoT
security
service charging
power saving mode
Language
ISSN
1063-6692
1558-2566
Abstract
More than 150 cellular networks worldwide have rolled out LTE-M (LTE-Machine Type Communication) and/or NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) technologies to support massive IoT services such as smart metering and environmental monitoring. Such cellular IoT services share the existing cellular network architecture with non-IoT (e.g., smartphone) ones. When they are newly integrated into the cellular network, new security vulnerabilities may happen from imprudent integration. In this work, we explore the security vulnerabilities of the cellular IoT from both system-integrated and service-integrated aspects. We discover several vulnerabilities spanning cellular standard design defects, network operation slips, and IoT device implementation flaws. Threateningly, they allow an adversary to remotely identify IP addresses and phone numbers assigned to cellular IoT devices, interrupt their power saving services, and launch various attacks, including data/text spamming, battery draining, device hibernation against them. We validate these vulnerabilities over five major cellular IoT carriers in the U.S. and Taiwan using their certified cellular IoT devices. The attack evaluation result shows that the adversary can raise an IoT data bill by up to ${\$}226$ with less than 120 MB spam traffic, increase an IoT text bill at a rate of ${\$}5$ per second, and prevent an IoT device from entering/leaving power saving mode; moreover, cellular IoT devices may suffer from denial of IoT services. We finally propose, prototype, and evaluate recommended solutions.