India develops tech to prevent attacks in 5G networks

Indian scientists have developed an indigenous software technology that can detect and prevent attacks in the 5G telecom networks, as per a recent statement by India's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Around 90% of the 5G technology is implemented into software by integrating several latest technologies (NFV, SDN, control plane/user plane segregation), which enables easy testing of the technology. However, the attack surface area is increased multifold in this process and is impossible to manage manually, a statement issued by the Indian Ministry added.

Currently, a majority of the run-time zero-day vulnerabilities are identified post-attack, thereby damaging the brand as well as increasing the cost of recovery.

Indian Institute of Technology, Madres Pravartak Technologies Foundation at IIT Madras, and Technology Innovation Hub for Sensors, Networking, Actuators and Control Systems (SNACS) are developing an indigenous security testing solution for 5G core network functions and Radio Access Network (RAN) software. 

This technology solution can automatically identify 'zero-day vulnerability' attacks in the network in advance by using techniques such as fuzzing and test oracles. It has been manually tested in the 5G security lab of IITM Pravartak. Since it can help avoid attacks in advance, it protects organisations against loss and saves the credibility of the brands, according to the statement.

The team of scientists in this project used ethical hacking for finding vulnerabilities in the system. They also tested the functionality issue in the network and created various attack scenarios based on topology, feature interaction, and the number of nodes involved by following the defined 5G standards of 3GPP.

As per the statement, reducing 'zero-day vulnerabilities' will shrink the attack surface area which, in turn, will reduce the need to pay ransom and also decrease network downtime of 5G networks which are crucial for communication.