5Ghoul: Unleashing Chaos on 5G Edge Devices

https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/5ghoul/

by rho138 • 3 years ago

137 24 3 years ago

asset-group.github.io

jruohonen• 3 years ago

Seems bad enough, although most seem plain DoS. Even with that, the fun may start soon and continue for a long time because most of these are never patched. (That said, I didn't read close enough to deduce how realistic exploitation is.)

osy• 3 years ago

They are all denial of service bugs. I.e. crashes/hangs. No remote code execution or disclosure of sensitive data.

Glad they were able to figure out the branding though.

bryancoxwell• 3 years ago

No [...] disclosure of sensitive data.

Not directly, but downgrading to LTE would almost certainly force a UE to expose its IMSI at least.

gafage• 3 years ago

You don't need a baseband exploit for that, just a jammer.

zapcto• 3 years ago

At least two other vulnerabilities are not disclosed yet due to confidentiality.

jdiff• 3 years ago

Glad they were able to figure out the branding though.

That's pretty obviously something someone threw together in a few minutes after grabbing a few [0] random images from the internet. This isn't one of those exploit sites with more effort poured into marketing than the exploits themselves.

[0] https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/ghost_1227567

coldpie• 3 years ago

The vulnerability branding trend is stupid, but I'm not sure it's worse for communicating what you're talking about than "CVE-2023-129038, 109239, and 120993" or "Those 5G vulnerabilities from uh I think 2022 or 2023? No not those, the other ones." Is there a better method?

fragmede• 3 years ago

I don't think it's stupid because I can't, off the top of my head, tell you the CVE number for Heartbleed, despite being very involved with it for a couple of weeks.

Heartbleed I remember, along with Spectre/Meltdown, but I couldn't name the weak exploits that turn out to be nothing burgers. Log4j could have used a brand though, imo.

fulafel• 3 years ago

They observed just crashes and they didn't try to research exploitability. Absent more details, and knowing the usual exploitability distribution of C crash bugs, this would seem in doubt still.

snvzz• 3 years ago

Proprietary, audit-unfriendly blobs.

It should be no surprise the code is crap quality, like the fw in those Polish trains, although those had malware to boot.

And then, the protocols themselves are encumbered. GSM is a disaster in general.

cogman102• 3 years ago

I hate that this is status quo for mobile hardware. And almost certainly just to enforce artificial support boundaries to sell more hardware.

hedora2• 3 years ago

It also enables a lot of surveillance and prevents innovation in cell phone business models. Imagine what things would be like if you could connect any compatible device to the phone network for the same price.

The land line network used to work like the cell network does today. Early home computer networks, and then later, home internet were enabled by the court ruling that said the phone company couldn't block you from plugging modems in (or charge more for the same copper wire if you did plug a modem in).

California network neutrality laws supposedly ban discrimination against devices as well as against web sites, but it's either unenforced, or there is a loophole.

genmud2• 3 years ago

Its status quo for almost all hardware. Your computers firmware/boot stack has probably some of the buggiest and error prone software you have running near you, unless you happen to be sitting in your car.

It feels like a damn miracle anything actually works.

neverrroot• 3 years ago

Happy to see these things getting more attention, they are a critical part of the modern mobile devices.

5Ghoul: Unleashing Chaos on 5G Edge Devices

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