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Adversarial Trends in Mobile Communication Systems: From Attack Patterns to Potential Defenses Strategies

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Secure IT Systems (NordSec 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 13115))

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Abstract

Understanding attack patterns and attacker behavior has always been a prominent security research topic to provide insights into adversarial trends and defense strategies. In this paper, we demonstrate the process of analyzing adversarial trends in mobile communication systems using a conceptual threat modeling framework combined with graph analysis methodologies. We model 60 attacks using the Bhadra framework [30] and conduct graph-theory-based analysis to deduce insights. We observed the attack patterns, the diversity of attack paths given an attacker’s ability or target impact, and the importance of each technique from a network graph viewpoint and discussed potential defense strategies that mobile operators can deploy accordingly. Our main contribution is demonstrating the potential of Bhadra for analyzing the security posture of an operator’s network and simplifying the complexity of the mobile networks to communicate the security analysis results.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Professor Tuomas Aura for providing constructive feedback and Nokia Bell Labs for funding the research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Hsin Yi Chen & Siddharth Prakash Rao

  2. Nokia Bell Labs, Espoo, Finland

    Siddharth Prakash Rao

Authors
  1. Hsin Yi Chen
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  2. Siddharth Prakash Rao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Siddharth Prakash Rao .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Nicola Tuveri

  2. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Antonis Michalas

  3. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Billy Bob Brumley

Appendix

Appendix

Table 2. Attacks collected from different sources for modeling
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Chen, H.Y., Rao, S.P. (2021). Adversarial Trends in Mobile Communication Systems: From Attack Patterns to Potential Defenses Strategies. In: Tuveri, N., Michalas, A., Brumley, B.B. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13115. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91625-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91625-1_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91624-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91625-1

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