Vulnerability Analysis of eBPF-enabled Containerized Deployments of 5G Core Networks
This addresses security risks for 5G network operators using eBPF for performance, highlighting overlooked vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.
The paper analyzes security vulnerabilities in eBPF-enabled 5G core network deployments, identifying and demonstrating exploitable attacks including denial-of-service, information theft, and bash injection in containerized setups.
The extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is useful for faster packet processing and network monitoring in softwarized deployments. Similarly, softwarized deployments of 5G core network services adopted eBPF to meet the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements of underlying applications. While the existing studies focused on network performance, security concerns over eBPF-enabled platforms are overlooked. In this paper, we study the vulnerability analysis of 5G core network deployments that use eBPF for packet processing and traffic monitoring. In particular, we consider the following aspects: a) tracing, b) denial-of-service (DoS), c) stealing information, and d) bash injection. We present the detailed attack scenarios with step-by-step implementation of containerized and eBPF-enabled 5G network functions using Open5GS. The experiment results show that the aforementioned vulnerabilities are present in eBPF-enabled 5G deployments and can be exploited by attackers. Finally, we present some mitigation techniques useful for addressing the vulnerabilities. The source code and implementation details are made available at https://github.com/chimms1/5G-eBPF-exploits.