Noncompliance as Deviant Behavior: An Automated Black-box Noncompliance Checker for 4G LTE Cellular Devices

Syed Rafiul Hussain, Imtiaz Karim, Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Omar Chowdhury, Elisa Bertino

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    9 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    The paper focuses on developing an automated black-box testing approach called DIKEUE that checks 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) control-plane protocol implementations in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) cellular devices (also, User Equipments or UEs) for noncompliance with the standard. Unlike prior noncompliance checking approaches which rely on property-guided testing, DIKEUE adopts a property-agnostic, differential testing approach, which leverages the existence of many different control-plane protocol implementations in COTS UEs. DIKEUE uses deviant behavior observed during differential analysis of pairwise COTS UEs as a proxy for identifying noncompliance instances. For deviant behavior identification, DIKEUE first uses black-box automata learning, specialized for 4G LTE control-plane protocols, to extract input-output finite state machine (FSM) for a given UE. It then reduces the identification of deviant behavior in two extracted FSMs as a model checking problem. We applied DIKEUE in checking noncompliance in 14 COTS UEs from 5 vendors and identified 15 new deviant behavior as well as 2 previous implementation issues. Among them, 11 are exploitable whereas 3 can cause potential interoperability issues.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationCCS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    Pages1082-1099
    Number of pages18
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450384544
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Nov 12 2021
    Event27th ACM Annual Conference on Computer and Communication Security, CCS 2021 - Virtual, Online, Korea, Republic of
    Duration: Nov 15 2021Nov 19 2021

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    ISSN (Print)1543-7221

    Conference

    Conference27th ACM Annual Conference on Computer and Communication Security, CCS 2021
    Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
    CityVirtual, Online
    Period11/15/2111/19/21

    All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

    • Software
    • Computer Networks and Communications

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