COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-606

Weakening of Cellular Encryption

An attacker, with control of a Cellular Rogue Base Station or through cooperation with a Malicious Mobile Network Operator can force the mobile device (e.g., the retransmission device) to use no encryption (A5/0 mode) or to use easily breakable encryption (A5/1 or A5/2 mode).

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

High

Likelihood of attack

Medium

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An attacker, with control of a Cellular Rogue Base Station or through cooperation with a Malicious Mobile Network Operator can force the mobile device (e.g., the retransmission device) to use no encryption (A5/0 mode) or to use easily breakable encryption (A5/1 or A5/2 mode).

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • Cellular devices that allow negotiating security modes to facilitate backwards compatibility and roaming on legacy networks.

Skills required

  • Medium: Adversaries can purchase and implement rogue BTS stations at a cost effective rate, and can push a mobile device to downgrade to a non-secure cellular protocol like 2G over GSM or CDMA.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Other

Affected scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Use of hardened baseband firmware on retransmission device to detect and prevent the use of weak cellular encryption.
2
Monitor cellular RF interface to detect the usage of weaker-than-expected cellular encryption.
CAPEC-606: Weakening of Cellular Encryption — DayBreach Saldırı Sözlüğü · DayBreach