Integrity Under Siege: A Rogue gNodeB's Manipulation of 5G Network Slice Allocation
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866914137863356416 |
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| author | Xu, Jiali Loscri, Valeria Rouvoy, Romain |
| author_facet | Xu, Jiali Loscri, Valeria Rouvoy, Romain |
| contents | The advent of 5G networks, with network slicing as a cornerstone technology, promises customized, high-performance services, but also introduces novel attack surfaces beyond traditional threats. This article investigates a critical and underexplored integrity vulnerability: the manipulation of network slice allocation to compromise Quality of Service (QoS) and resource integrity. We introduce a threat model, grounded in a risk analysis of permissible yet insecure configurations like null-ciphering (5G-EA0), demonstrating how a rogue gNodeB acting as a Man-in-the-Middle can exploit protocol weaknesses to forge slice requests and hijack a User Equipment's (UE) connection. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation on a 5G testbed, we demonstrate the attack's versatile and severe impacts. Our findings show this integrity breach can manifest as obvious QoS degradation, such as a 95% bandwidth reduction and 150% latency increase when forcing UE to a suboptimal slice, or as stealthy slice manipulation that is indistinguishable from benign network operation and generates no core network errors. Furthermore, we validate a systemic resource contamination attack where redirecting a crowd of UE orchestrates a Denial-of-Service, causing packet loss to exceed 60% and inducing measurable CPU saturation (~80%) on core network User Plane Functions (UPFs). Based on these results, we discuss the profound implications for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and critical infrastructure. We propose concrete, cross-layer mitigation strategies for network operators as future work, underscoring the urgent need to secure the integrity of dynamic resource management in 5G networks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03312 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Integrity Under Siege: A Rogue gNodeB's Manipulation of 5G Network Slice Allocation Xu, Jiali Loscri, Valeria Rouvoy, Romain Networking and Internet Architecture Software Engineering The advent of 5G networks, with network slicing as a cornerstone technology, promises customized, high-performance services, but also introduces novel attack surfaces beyond traditional threats. This article investigates a critical and underexplored integrity vulnerability: the manipulation of network slice allocation to compromise Quality of Service (QoS) and resource integrity. We introduce a threat model, grounded in a risk analysis of permissible yet insecure configurations like null-ciphering (5G-EA0), demonstrating how a rogue gNodeB acting as a Man-in-the-Middle can exploit protocol weaknesses to forge slice requests and hijack a User Equipment's (UE) connection. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation on a 5G testbed, we demonstrate the attack's versatile and severe impacts. Our findings show this integrity breach can manifest as obvious QoS degradation, such as a 95% bandwidth reduction and 150% latency increase when forcing UE to a suboptimal slice, or as stealthy slice manipulation that is indistinguishable from benign network operation and generates no core network errors. Furthermore, we validate a systemic resource contamination attack where redirecting a crowd of UE orchestrates a Denial-of-Service, causing packet loss to exceed 60% and inducing measurable CPU saturation (~80%) on core network User Plane Functions (UPFs). Based on these results, we discuss the profound implications for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and critical infrastructure. We propose concrete, cross-layer mitigation strategies for network operators as future work, underscoring the urgent need to secure the integrity of dynamic resource management in 5G networks. |
| title | Integrity Under Siege: A Rogue gNodeB's Manipulation of 5G Network Slice Allocation |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03312 |