SUCI Attacks
Subscription Concealed Identifier (SUCI) attacks attempt to compromise the 5G privacy mechanism designed to protect subscriber identities through cryptographic concealment.
Technical Overview
5G uses SUCI to protect SUPI (Subscription Permanent Identifier) through public key encryption. Attacks target the encryption implementation, key management, or exploit scenarios where SUPI must be transmitted in cleartext for backward compatibility.
- •Subscriber identity exposure
- •Privacy protection bypass
- •Enabling of tracking and surveillance
- •Correlation with legacy network identifiers
- •Targeted attack facilitation
- •Cryptographic implementation vulnerabilities
- •Key management exploitation
- •Forcing fallback to SUPI transmission
- •Side-channel attacks on SUCI generation
- •Exploiting null-scheme SUCI
- 1Deploy rogue gNodeB to intercept SUCI
- 2Analyze SUCI encryption implementation
- 3Attempt to force SUPI transmission
- 4Exploit backward compatibility scenarios
- 5Correlate SUCI with other identifiers
- 6Build subscriber identity database
- Implement strong SUCI encryption schemes
- Avoid null-scheme SUCI in production
- Secure key management infrastructure
- Monitor for SUPI transmission attempts
- Implement additional privacy layers
- Regular security audits of SUCI implementation
- →Security research on 5G privacy
- →Theoretical attacks on SUCI schemes
- →Implementation vulnerability discoveries
- →Backward compatibility exploitation
Related Attacks
gNodeB spoofing involves deploying fake 5G base stations that impersonate legitimate network infrastructure to intercept communications and perform man-in-the-middle attacks.
Despite 4G LTE's improved security, IMSI extraction attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the attach procedure to capture subscriber identities before encryption is established.
Location tracking attacks exploit LTE protocols and network architecture to determine the physical location of mobile devices without user consent or awareness.