GPRS Security Feature, Threats and Solution

Figure 1: GPRS Security Model

2.1 GPRS SECURITY THREATS

There are mainly few main categories for security threats such as: Availability, Authentication & Authorization and Integrity & Confidentiality.

2.1.1 Availability

The most common type of attack on availability is a denial of service (DoS) attack. Several types of DoS attacks that are possible on the Gp interface:

-          Border Gateway bandwidth saturation: Malicious operation having the ability to generate a sufficient amount of network traffic directed at a Border Gateway such that legitimate traffic is starved for bandwidth in or out of the PLMN, thus denying roaming access to or from the network.

-          DNS Flood: DNS servers on the network can be flooded with either correctly or malformed DNS queries or other traffic thereby denying subscribers the ability to locate proper GGSN to use as an external gateway

2.1.2 Authentication & Authorization

It may be possible for an imposter to appear to be a legitimate subscriber when they are not.

-          Spoofed Create PDP Context Request: An attacker can use their own SGSN or a compromised SGSN to send an Update PDP Context Request to an SGSN which is handling an existing GTP session. The attacker can then insert their own SGSN into the GTP session and hijack the subscriber data connection.

2.1.3 Integrity & Confidentiality

- Should an attacker be in a position to access GTP or DNS traffic, they can potentially alter it mid-stream or discover confidential subscriber information.


References:
www.brookson.com/gsm/gprs.pdf
netscreen.com/solutions/literature/white_papers/200074.pdf
ijns.femto.com.tw/contents/ijns-v6.../ijns-2008-v6-n2-p158-169.pdf
www.tml.tkk.fi/Opinnot/Tik-110.501/2000/papers/peng.pdf
http://netscreen.com/solutions/literature/white_papers/200074.pdf