New Sni5Gect Attack Crashes Phones and Downgrades 5G to 4G without Rogue Base Station
Without using a rogue base station (gNB), a group of researchers has developed a new technique that can be used to downgrade a 5G connection to a lower generation.
The attack is based on a new open-source software toolkit called Sni5Gect (short for Sniffing 5G Inject), which is intended to sniff unencrypted messages sent between the base station and the user equipment (UE, such as a phone) and inject messages to the target UE over-the-air, according to the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
Shijie Luo, Matheus Garbelini, Sudipta Chattopadhyay, and Jianying Zhou claim that the framework can be used to perform attacks such crashing the UE modem, downgrading to earlier network generations, fingerprinting, or au...