The challenge offers a unique opportunity to hack the Packet Core Gateway which is an integral part of the mobile 5G core infrastructure.
When it comes to 5G, the information security is a top concern among governments and enterprises which are embarking on a digital transformation journey. It's paramount that 5G is secure from the start, protecting personal data and business-sensitive information.
For us at Ericsson, it is important to understand how external (cyber)security community, including ethical hackers, security researchers and security enthusiasts, sees relevant risks and vulnerabilities for 5G technology. Gaining an understanding how these risks and vulnerabilities could be potentially exploited can help us timely address these risks and vulnerabilities.
Our challenge offers a unique opportunity to go beyond the 5G radio interface, to the backbone of the mobile 5G core infrastructure, which is Packet Core Gateway.
Packet Core Gateway is built using cloud native best practices to deliver a massively scalable, flexible and efficient software product, aligned with the rest of Ericsson’s 5G Core offering.
Ericsson Packet Core Gateway is the new, cloud native user plane traffic processing and gateway function in Ericsson’s 5G Core offering.
We expect that you are versed in network fuzzing to be able to challenge the robustness of the 5G Core Gateway and finding flaws in the stack implementations that can potentially bring down the network or cause a major outage.
Ericsson Packet Core Gateway complies with 3GPP Release 15/16 specification.
The User Plane Function acts as an interconnect point between the mobile infrastructure and the Data Network (DN), i.e. encapsulation and decapsulation of GPRS Tunneling Protocol for the user plane (GTPU).
You will have access to the 3GPP interfaces as well as access to the Operational and Maintenance interface of this cloud native product.
You would benefit of being familiar with 3GPP specifications and protocols, you will need to study the subject well in advance, preparing your plan of attack, and if necessary, develop some tools.
We are willing to expose our products for public security testing and evaluation and we are willing to award external players with prizes for their hard work and we are committing to fix identified vulnerabilities.
We have allocated an award fund of 10 000 EUR, specifically for this event. The award fund will be split into prizes based on severity of their findings and relevance to the challenge.
Ericsson product security and product development experts will evaluate and judge the findings.
The challenge will utilize black-box, grey-box and white-box approach, where we will feed in more information about the product to the challenge participants during the progress of the event.
The issues and vulnerabilities identified in the black-box phase would have a higher score than vulnerabilities identified in the grey-box and white-box phases.
For reporting of identified findings/vulnerabilities we would use CVSS v3.1 (Common Vulnerability Scoring System).