Abstract

IMSI catchers aka Stingrays aka fake base stations are well-known privacy threats to almost every mobile phone with SIM card connectivity (including iOS or Android-based) in the world. The cellular network generations such as 2G, 3G, and 4G are vulnerable to such almost undetectable and silent attacks. Finally, new security mechanisms in the next generation 5G networks have been added to address these types of issues.

In this talk, we carefully investigate new security protection techniques in 5G and perform practical experiments using commercial 5G devices. Besides, we explain our failure and successful attempts at building 5G IMSI catchers for our research. Finally, we conclude with results explaining the impact of 5G IMSI catchers against 5G users without downgrading to legacy networks, guidelines for the cellular device vendors, operators, and end-users and directions towards fixing the problem in 6G networks.