title: Empirical study of the transport layer performance and security in mobile networks
title: An empirical study of the transport layer performance and security in mobile networks
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Mitra, Rupendra Nath
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: ultra-low latency
subject: high-speed reliable connectivity
subject: software-defined networking (SDN)
subject: user plane separation (CUPS)
subject: QUIC
subject: radio access network (RAN)
subject: low rate DoS (LDoS) traffic
subject: 5G

description: Enabling ultra-low latency, and high-speed reliable connectivity, the latest generations of mobile networks are equipped to cater to diverse business and application requirements. Technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN), control and user plane separation (CUPS), deep-learning-based AI solutions along with newer networking protocols such as QUIC play critical roles in mobile networks to ensure state-of-the-art network performance. This thesis thoroughly reviews the evolving security threat landscape of the modern mobile networks, empirically investigate the impacts of CUPS hijacking of a radio access network (RAN) slicing system on the overall network performances, and finally presents an experimental evaluation and characterization of QUIC performance over commercial 5G network. In emerging mobile networks, CUPS plays a critical role in scaling the control-plane and user-plane functions independently and enables network virtualization through network slicing. However, a CUPS hijacking attack on a mobile network slicing system and the resulting network performance degradation are yet to be studied. We investigate the consequences of CUPS hijacking of a RAN slicing system on the overall network performance. We quantify the impacts of CUPS hijacking by designing an Impact Factor metric I, prototype a real-world RAN slicing use case on an end-to-end mobile network test-bed, and systematically analyze the empirical results to reveal the impacts of CUPS hijacking on the network performance. We show a successful CUPS hijacking by a rogue slice owner in a RAN slicing system increases the RAN slice control-plane signaling delay above 2ms, the operational upper-bound of our system, to disrupt the control plane operations by injecting low rate DoS (LDoS) traffic in user-plane. The naive hijacking can degrade the throughput performances of the rogue slice as well as a co-located victim slice down to 0 Mbps. We further show that carefully crafted user-plane traffic by the attacker can regain $\sim$92\% of its original user-plane packet delivery success rate while other slices are under the denial of service. On the other hand, the new transport layer protocol QUIC is being adopted by major internet application providers such as Google and Facebook signifying a paradigm shift from the de-facto transport layer protocol TCP. However, the interactions between 5G as a network data link layer for QUIC transport protocol to deliver modern web browsing, video streaming, and file downloading applications remain unexplored. We conduct an in-depth study of 5G and QUIC interactions and their impact on application performances by collecting measurements taken in the wild involving commercial 5G networks and production-grade QUIC application servers. Results from the study reveal that end-user experience of accessing popular web services such as 4K video streaming on YouTube, file downloading from the Google cloud server, Google Search, and Maps on QUIC remain similar to the experience when accessed on TCP, over mobile networks.