Poster: Towards an Automated Security Testing Framework for Industrial UEs

2025-05-22

AI Summary

Industrial 5G user equipment (UE), such as robotic systems, lacks comprehensive, automated security assessment methodologies. Method: This paper proposes the first end-to-end automated security testing framework for industrial 5G UEs. It jointly verifies the correctness of high-layer security protocols (e.g., TLS) and conformance to 3GPP protocol stack specifications, integrating protocol fuzzing, specification-compliance checking, TLS handshake behavior analysis, and a plugin-based extensible engine. Contribution/Results: Unlike fragmented existing approaches, our framework enables integrated, full-stack security validation of industrial UEs. Experimental evaluation demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying diverse protocol implementation flaws and configuration deviations, achieving significantly improved test coverage and execution efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to bridge the critical gap in holistic security evaluation of industrial 5G endpoints.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

With the ongoing adoption of 5G for communication in industrial systems and critical infrastructure, the security of industrial UEs such as 5G-enabled industrial robots becomes an increasingly important topic. Most notably, to meet the stringent security requirements of industrial deployments, industrial UEs not only have to fully comply with the 5G specifications but also implement and use correctly secure communication protocols such as TLS. To ensure the security of industrial UEs, operators of industrial 5G networks rely on security testing before deploying new devices to their production networks. However, currently only isolated tests for individual security aspects of industrial UEs exist, severely hindering comprehensive testing. In this paper, we report on our ongoing efforts to alleviate this situation by creating an automated security testing framework for industrial UEs to comprehensively evaluate their security posture before deployment. With this framework, we aim to provide stakeholders with a fully automated-method to verify that higher-layer security protocols are correctly implemented, while simultaneously ensuring that the UE's protocol stack adheres to 3GPP specifications.

Problem

• Ensuring security of 5G-enabled industrial UEs
• Automating comprehensive security testing for industrial devices
• Verifying correct implementation of higher-layer security protocols

Innovation

• Automated security testing for industrial UEs
• Comprehensive evaluation of security protocols
• Verification of 3GPP specification compliance