Saint 5Ghoul, Demon of the Modem

Patron of 5G modems, fake base stations, and everyone left with no signal at the worst moment.

Life

In December 2023 the ASSET group at SUTD in Singapore published 5Ghoul, a family of flaws in Qualcomm and MediaTek 5G modems built into hundreds of phone and router models. With a rogue base station sending malformed RRC messages, a nearby attacker could make the modem freeze or reboot over and over, leaving the device without a connection until the radio was turned off.

Prayer

O Saint 5Ghoul, who haunts the modem from a cell that does not exist, let our basebands distrust unknown towers. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating the baseband firmware and, when in doubt, flicking airplane mode on for a moment.

Unknown antenna, haunted connection.