Sometimes we tend to take our technology for granted and assume that it should just work flawlessly. However, it isn’t always the case as researchers, a group of academics from South Korea have identified 36 new vulnerabilities in the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard used by thousands of mobile networks and hundreds of millions of users across the world. South Korean researchers apply Fuzzing techniques to LTE protocol and find 51 vulnerabilities, of which 36 were new. This involves sending massive amounts of data, or ‘fuzz,’ to a test subject with the objective of pinpointing security loopholes.
Since LTE connects to our phones, tablets, and even cars, it sounds like it could be a pretty serious issue. These vulnerabilities allow hackers to disrupt mobile base stations, block incoming calls to a device, disconnect users from a mobile network, send spoofed SMS messages, and eavesdrop and manipulate user data traffic. Since this issue is not necessarily consistent, meaning that different carriers could have different flaws, so there is no one solution to fix everything.
The research team plans to officially present its findings at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Conference in late May.
So far we haven’t really heard any reports of these flaws being exploited, so while they are out there, the good news is that no one has figured out a way to take advantage of them yet.
Hopefully, a fix will be released in time to prevent anything untoward from happening.