Breaking and Fixing VoLTE: Exploiting Hidden Data Channels and Mis-implementations

Impact

At the time, only South Korea and the United States had widely deployed Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology, so no other countries were affected. The vulnerabilities were jointly disclosed with the the US Cyber Emergency Response Team (US Cert) as VU#943167. At the time, none of the US operators acknowledged the vulnerabilities, but they later patched them silently. After this investigation, we received funding from SK Telecom to start investigating security of LTE networks. We were invited to make a presentation at GSMA, the organization of the operators. The findings were covered by multiple media outlets, such as IT World, Nexus Security Bulletin, DSLReports, Softpedia, tom’s guide, Pocketnow, FierceMobileIT, Techworm, Neowin, and Network World.

Media Coverage

• US Cert
• IT World
• Nexus Security Bulletin
• DSLReports
• Softpedia
• tom’s guide
• Pocketnow
• FierceMobileIT
• Techworm
• Neowin