With the introduction of the packet service, mobile user equipment (UE) can use the IP communication protocol. Without the proper routing and filtering of UE communications, some sensitive assets on the operator's infrastructure could be exposed, such as core network services. Mobile operators generally know this attack vector and apply suitable mechanisms to avoid risk from the subscriber context. Nevertheless, those mechanisms differ from one operator to another, and their effectiveness varies. Research aspects in mobile networks are evolving a lot with the development of the SDR (Software-Defined Radio) and the SDNs (Software-Defined Networks), which introduce new kinds of architectures. These new architectures are mostly cloud-based systems and include new features that need time to understand and entirely mature from the deployment perspective. In addition, with the research progress of SDR based 4G and 5G-NR NSA networks, new services also appeared to be used inside organizations like private mobile networks. However, the organization itself only provides all security procedures and mechanisms. This post is an overview of previous assessments on private GPRS and LTE mobile network commercial and public solutions and 5G-NR NSA setups.

This article has been co-written and published in Medium on this page: https://medium.com/mobile-stacks-and-networks-security/introduction-to-mobile-network-intrusions-from-a-mobile-phone-9a8e909cc276.