An Automated Vulnerability Detection Method for the 5G RRC Protocol Based on Fuzzing

The widespread deployment and application of 5G call for new methods and tools to detect the vulnerabilities of 5G equipment to improve the security of 5G. RRC protocol is responsible for the management of radio connections and is the key protocol for security. Existing methods, such as formal verification and firmware reverse engineering have high requirements of time investment and personal experience. This paper proposes the fuzzing implementation model for air interface protocols and the vulnerability detection model of the 5G RRC protocol to realize stateful multi-granularity vulnerability detection for the 5G RRC protocol. We implemented the proposed method in a laboratory environment based on an open-source 5G platform and discovered three vulnerabilities of the UE and one vulnerability of the gNodeB. These vulnerabilities may lead to denial of service (DoS), which proves the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method. Based on the findings, we propose several countermeasures for security enhancement in 5G.