5Gone: Uplink Overshadowing Attacks in 5G-SA

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Erni, Simon, Kotuliak, Martin, Roeschlin, Marc, Baker, Richard, Capkun, Srdjan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Erni, Simon
Kotuliak, Martin
Roeschlin, Marc
Baker, Richard
Capkun, Srdjan
author_facet Erni, Simon
Kotuliak, Martin
Roeschlin, Marc
Baker, Richard
Capkun, Srdjan
contents 5G presents numerous advantages compared to previous generations: improved throughput, lower latency, and improved privacy protection for subscribers. Attacks against 5G standalone (SA) commonly use fake base stations (FBS), which need to operate at a very high output power level to lure victim phones to connect to them and are thus highly detectable. In this paper, we introduce 5Gone, a powerful software-defined radio (SDR)-based uplink overshadowing attack method against 5G-SA. 5Gone exploits deficiencies in the 3GPP standard to perform surgical, covert denial-of-service, privacy, and downgrade attacks. Uplink overshadowing means that an attacker is transmitting at exactly the same time and frequency as the victim UE, but with a slightly higher output power. 5Gone runs on a COTS x86 computer without any need for dedicated hardware acceleration and can overshadow commercial 100 MHz cells with an E2E latency of less than 500$μ$s, which up to now has not been possible with any software-based UE implementation. We demonstrate that 5Gone is highly scalable, even when many UEs are connecting in parallel, and finally evaluate the attacks end-to-end against 7 phone models and three different chipset vendors both in our lab and in the real-world on public gNodeBs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10272
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 5Gone: Uplink Overshadowing Attacks in 5G-SA
Erni, Simon
Kotuliak, Martin
Roeschlin, Marc
Baker, Richard
Capkun, Srdjan
Cryptography and Security
5G presents numerous advantages compared to previous generations: improved throughput, lower latency, and improved privacy protection for subscribers. Attacks against 5G standalone (SA) commonly use fake base stations (FBS), which need to operate at a very high output power level to lure victim phones to connect to them and are thus highly detectable. In this paper, we introduce 5Gone, a powerful software-defined radio (SDR)-based uplink overshadowing attack method against 5G-SA. 5Gone exploits deficiencies in the 3GPP standard to perform surgical, covert denial-of-service, privacy, and downgrade attacks. Uplink overshadowing means that an attacker is transmitting at exactly the same time and frequency as the victim UE, but with a slightly higher output power. 5Gone runs on a COTS x86 computer without any need for dedicated hardware acceleration and can overshadow commercial 100 MHz cells with an E2E latency of less than 500$μ$s, which up to now has not been possible with any software-based UE implementation. We demonstrate that 5Gone is highly scalable, even when many UEs are connecting in parallel, and finally evaluate the attacks end-to-end against 7 phone models and three different chipset vendors both in our lab and in the real-world on public gNodeBs.
title 5Gone: Uplink Overshadowing Attacks in 5G-SA
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10272