Category Archives: Mobile Networks

Inside a 32×32 MIMO Antenna

5G SA, EUTRAN, Mobile Networks, RF, ,

For the past few months I’ve had a Band 78 NR active antenna unit sitting next to my desk.

It’s a very cool bit of kit that doesn’t get enough love, but I thought I’d pop open the radome and take a peek inside.

Individual antenna elements

What I found very interesting is that it’s not all antennas in there!

… 29, 30, 31, 32. Yup. Checks out.

There are the expected number of antennas (I mean if I opened it up and found 31 antennas I’d have been surprised) but they don’t take up the whole volume of the unit, only about half,

AAU with Radome reinstalled

Well, after that strip show, back to sitting in my office until I need to test something 5G SA again…

SQN Sync in IMS Auth

IMS / VoLTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, SDM, SIM Cards, Software, , , , , , ,

So the issue was a head scratcher.

Everything was working on the IMS, then I go to bed, the next morning I fire up the test device and it just won’t authenticate to the IMS – The S-CSCF generated a 401 in response to the REGISTER, but the next REGISTER wouldn’t pass.

Wireshark just shows me this loop:

UE -> IMS: REGISTER
IMS -> UE: 401 Unauthorized (With Challenge)
UE -> IMS: REGISTER with response
IMS -> UE: 401 Unauthorized (With Challenge)
UE -> IMS: REGISTER with response
IMS -> UE: 401 Unauthorized (With Challenge)
UE -> IMS: REGISTER with response
IMS -> UE: 401 Unauthorized (With Challenge)

So what’s going on here?

IMS uses AKAv1-MD5 for Authentication, this is slightly different to the standard AKA auth used in cellular, but if you’re curious, we’ve covered by IMS Authentication and standard AKA based SIM Authentication in cellular networks before.

When we generate the vectors (for IMS auth and standard auth) one of the inputs to generate the vectors is the Sequence Number or SQN.

This SQN ticks over like an odometer for the number of times the SIM / HSS authentication process has been performed.

There is some leeway in the SQN – It may not always match between the SIM and the HSS and that’s to be expected.
When the MME sends an Authentication-Information-Request it can ask for multiple vectors so it’s got some in reserve for the next time the subscriber attaches, and that’s allowed.

Information stored on USIM / SIM Card for LTE / EUTRAN / EPC - K key, OP/OPc key and SQN Sequence Number

But there are limits to how far out our SQN can be, and for good reason – One of the key purposes for the SQN is to protect against replay attacks, where the same vector is replayed to the UE. So the SQN on the HSS can be ahead of the SIM (within reason), but it can’t be behind – Odometers don’t go backwards.

So the issue was with the SQN on the SIM being out of Sync with the SQN in the IMS, how do we know this is the case, and how do we fix this?

Well there is a resync mechanism so the SIM can securely tell the HSS what the current SQN it is using, so the HSS can update it’s SQN.

When verifying the AUTN, the client may detect that the sequence numbers between the client and the server have fallen out of sync.
In this case, the client produces a synchronization parameter AUTS, using the shared secret K and the client sequence number SQN.
The AUTS parameter is delivered to the network in the authentication response, and the authentication can be tried again based on authentication vectors generated with the synchronized sequence number.

RFC 3110: HTTP Digest Authentication using AKA

In our example we can tell the sub is out of sync as in our Multimedia Authentication Request we see the SIP-Authorization AVP, which contains the AUTS (client synchronization parameter) which the SIM generated and the UE sent back to the S-CSCF. Our HSS can use the AUTS value to determine the correct SQN.

SIP-Authorization AVP in the Multimedia Authentication Request means the SQN is out of Sync and this AVP contains the RAND and AUTN required to Resync

Note: The SIP-Authorization AVP actually contains both the RAND and the AUTN concatenated together, so in the above example the first 32 bytes are the AUTN value, and the last 32 bytes are the RAND value.

So the HSS gets the AUTS and from it is able to calculate the correct SQN to use.

Then the HSS just generates a new Multimedia Authentication Answer with a new vector using the correct SQN, sends it back to the IMS and presto, the UE can respond to the challenge normally.

This feature is now fully implemented in PyHSS for anyone wanting to have a play with it and see how it all works.

And that friends, is how we do SQN resync in IMS!

HOMER API in Python

Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, IMS / VoLTE, Kamailio, Mobile Networks, VoIP, , , , ,

We’re doing more and more network automation, and something that came up as valuable to us would be to have all the IPs in HOMER SIP Capture come up as the hostnames of the VM running the service.

Luckily for us HOMER has an API for this ready to roll, and best of all, it’s Swagger based and easily documented (awesome!).

(Probably through my own failure to properly RTFM) I was struggling to work out the correct (current) way to Authenticate against the API service using a username and password.

Because the HOMER team are awesome however, the web UI for HOMER, is just an API client.

This means to look at how to log into the API, I just needed to fire up Wireshark, log into the Web UI via my browser and then flick through the packets for a real world example of how to do this.

Homer Login JSON body as seen by Wireshark

In the Login action I could see the browser posts a JSON body with the username and password to /api/v3/auth

{"username":"admin","password":"sipcapture","type":"internal"}

And in return the Homer API Server responds with a 201 Created an a auth token back:

Now in order to use the API we just need to include that token in our Authorization: header then we can hit all the API endpoints we want!

For me, the goal we were setting out to achieve was to setup the aliases from our automatically populated list of hosts. So using the info above I setup a simple Python script with Requests to achieve this:

import requests
s = requests.Session()

#Login and get Token
url = 'http://homer:9080/api/v3/auth'
json_data = {"username":"admin","password":"sipcapture"}
x = s.post(url, json = json_data)
print(x.content)
token = x.json()['token']
print("Token is: " + str(token))


#Add new Alias
alias_json = {
          "alias": "Blog Example",
          "captureID": "0",
          "id": 0,
          "ip": "1.2.3.4",
          "mask": 32,
          "port": 5060,
          "status": True
        }

x = s.post('http://homer:9080/api/v3/alias', json = alias_json, headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + token})
print(x.status_code)
print(x.content)


#Print all Aliases
x = s.get('http://homer:9080/api/v3/alias', headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + token})
print(x.json())

And bingo we’re done, a new alias defined.

We wrapped this up in a for loop for each of the hosts / subnets we use and hooked it into our build system and away we go!

With the Homer API the world is your oyster in terms of functionality, all the features of the Web UI are exposed on the API as the Web UI just uses the API (something I wish was more common!).

Using the Swagger based API docs you can see examples of how to achieve everything you need to, and if you ever get stuck, just fire up Wireshark and do it in the Homer WebUI for an example of how the bodies should look.

Thanks to the Homer team at QXIP for making such a great product!

Getting to know the PCRF for traffic Policy, Rules & Rating

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, SDM, ,

Misunderstood, under appreciated and more capable than people give it credit for, is our PCRF.

But what does it do?

Most folks describe the PCRF in hand wavy-terms – “it does policy and charging” is the answer you’ll get, but that doesn’t really tell you anything.

So let’s answer it in a way that hopefully makes some practical sense, starting with the acronym “PCRF” itself, it stands for Policy and Charging Rules Function, which is kind of two functions, one for policy and one for rules, so let’s take a look at both.

Policy

In cellular world, as in law, policy is the rules.

For us some examples of policy could be a “fair use policy” to limit customer usage to acceptable levels, but it can also be promotional packages, services like “free Spotify” packages, “Voice call priority” or “unmetered access to Nick’s Blog and maximum priority” packages, can be offered to customers.

All of these are examples of policy, and to make them work we need to target which subscribers and traffic we want to apply the policy to, and then apply the policy.

Charging Rules

Charging Rules are where the policy actually gets applied and the magic happens.

It’s where we take our policy and turn it into actionable stuff for the cellular world.

Let’s take an example of “unmetered access to Nick’s Blog and maximum priority” as something we want to offer in all our cellular plans, to provide access that doesn’t come out of your regular usage, as well as provide QCI 5 (Highest non dedicated QoS) to this traffic.

To achieve this we need to do 3 things:

  • Profile the traffic going to this website (so we capture this traffic and not regular other internet traffic)
  • Charge it differently – So it’s not coming from the subscriber’s regular balance
  • Up the QoS (QCI) on this traffic to ensure it’s high priority compared to the other traffic on the network

So how do we do that?

Profiling Traffic

So the first step we need to take in providing free access to this website is to filter out traffic to this website, from the traffic not going to this website.

Let’s imagine that this website is hosted on a single machine with the IP 1.2.3.4, and it serves traffic on TCP port 443. This is where IPFilterRules (aka TFTs or “Traffic Flow Templates”) and the Flow-Description AVP come into play. We’ve covered this in the past here, but let’s recap:

IPFilterRules are defined in the Diameter Base Protocol (IETF RFC 6733), where we can learn the basics of encoding them,

They take the format:

action dir proto from src to dst

The action is fairly simple, for all our Dedicated Bearer needs, and the Flow-Description AVP, the action is going to be permit. We’re not blocking here.

The direction (dir) in our case is either in or out, from the perspective of the UE.

Next up is the protocol number (proto), as defined by IANA, but chances are you’ll be using 17 (UDP) or 6 (TCP).

The from value is followed by an IP address with an optional subnet mask in CIDR format, for example from 10.45.0.0/16 would match everything in the 10.45.0.0/16 network.

Following from you can also specify the port you want the rule to apply to, or, a range of ports.

Like the from, the to is encoded in the same way, with either a single IP, or a subnet, and optional ports specified.

And that’s it!

So let’s create a rule that matches all traffic to our website hosted on 1.2.3.4 TCP port 443,

permit out 6 from 1.2.3.4 443 to any 1-65535
permit out 6 from any 1-65535 to 1.2.3.4 443

All this info gets put into the Flow-Information AVPs:

With the above, any traffic going to/from 1.23.4 on port 443, will match this rule (unless there’s another rule with a higher precedence value).

Charging Actions

So with our traffic profiled, the next question is what actions are we going to take, well there’s two, we’re going to provide unmetered access to the profiled traffic, and we’re going to use QCI 4 for the traffic (because you’ll need a guaranteed bit rate bearer to access!).

Charging-Group for Profiled Traffic

To allow for Zero Rating for traffic matching this rule, we’ll need to use a different Rating Group.

Let’s imagine our default rating group for data is 10000, then any normal traffic going to the OCS will use rating group 10000, and the OCS will apply the specific rates and policies based on that.

Rating Groups are defined in the OCS, and dictate what rates get applied to what Rating Groups.

For us, our default rating group will be charged at the normal rates, but we can define a rating group value of 4000, and set the OCS to provide unlimited traffic to any Credit-Control-Requests that come in with Rating Group 4000.

This is how operators provide services like “Unlimited Facebook” for example, a Charging Rule matches the traffic to Facebook based on TFTs, and then the Rating Group is set differently to the default rating group, and the OCS just allows all traffic on that rating group, regardless of how much is consumed.

Inside our Charging-Rule-Definition, we populate the Rating-Group AVP to define what Rating Group we’re going to use.

Setting QoS for Profiled Traffic

The QoS Description AVP defines which QoS parameters (QCI / ARP / Guaranteed & Maximum Bandwidth) should be applied to the traffic that matches the rules we just defined.

As mentioned at the start, we’ll use QCI 4 for this traffic, and allocate MBR/GBR values for this traffic.

Putting it Together – The Charging Rule

So with our TFTs defined to match the traffic, our Rating Group to charge the traffic and our QoS to apply to the traffic, we’re ready to put the whole thing together.

So here it is, our “Free NVN” rule:

I’ve attached a PCAP of the flow to this post.

In our next post we’ll talk about how the PGW handles the installation of this rule.

Diameter_Gx_ChargingRule_InstallDownload

Failures in cobbling together a USSD Gateway

IMS / VoLTE, Kamailio, Mobile Networks, VoIP, , , ,

One day recently I was messing with the XCAP server, trying to set the Call Forward timeout. In the process I triggered the UE to send a USSD request to the IMS.

Huh, I thought, “I wonder how hard it would be to build a USSD Gateway for our IMS?”, and this my friends, is the story of how I wasted a good chunk of my weekend trying (and failing) to add support for USSD.

You might be asking “Who still uses USSD?” – The use cases for USSD are pretty thin on the ground in this day and age, but I guess balance query, and uh…

But this is the story of what I tried before giving up and going outside…

Routing

First I’d need to get the USSD traffic towards the USSD Gateway, this means modifying iFCs. Skimming over the spec I can see the Recv-Info: header for USSD traffic should be set to “g.3gpp.ussd” so I knocked up an iFC to match that, and route the traffic to my dev USSD Gateway, and added it to the subscriber profile in PyHSS:

  <!-- SIP USSD Traffic to USSD-GW-->
        <InitialFilterCriteria>
            <Priority>25</Priority>
            <TriggerPoint>
                <ConditionTypeCNF>1</ConditionTypeCNF>
                <SPT>
                    <ConditionNegated>0</ConditionNegated>
                    <Group>1</Group>
                    <SIPHeader>
                      <Header>Recv-Info</Header>
                      <Content>"g.3gpp.ussd"</Content>
                    </SIPHeader>
                </SPT>                
            </TriggerPoint>
            <ApplicationServer>
                <ServerName>sip:ussdgw:5060</ServerName>
                <DefaultHandling>0</DefaultHandling>
            </ApplicationServer>
        </InitialFilterCriteria>

Easy peasy, now we have the USSD requests hitting our USSD Gateway.

The Response

I’ll admit that I didn’t jump straight to the TS doc from the start.

The first place I headed was Google to see if I could find any PCAPs of USSD over IMS/SIP.

And I did – Restcomm seems to have had a USSD product a few years back, and trawling around their stuff provided some reference PCAPs of USSD over SIP.

ussd_20012017.pcap_Download
USSD-Restcomm_dialogTimeoutTest.pcap_.pcapngDownload

So the flow seemed pretty simple, SIP INVITE to set up the session, SIP INFO for in-dialog responses and a BYE at the end.

With all the USSD guts transferred as XML bodies, in a way that’s pretty easy to understand.

Being a Kamailio fan, that’s the first place I started, but quickly realised that SIP proxies, aren’t great at acting as the UAS.

So I needed to generate in-dialog SIP INFO messages, so I turned to the UAC module to generate the SIP INFO response.

My Kamailio code is super simple, but let’s have a look:

request_route {

        xlog("Request $rm from $fU");

        if(is_method("INVITE")){
                xlog("USSD from $fU to $rU (Emergency number) CSeq is $cs ");
                sl_reply("200", "OK Trying USSD Phase 1");      #Generate 200 OK
                route("USSD_Response"); #Call USSD_Response route block
                exit;
        }
}

route["USSD_Response"]{
        xlog("USSD_Response Route");
        #Generate a new UAC Request
        $uac_req(method)="INFO";
        $uac_req(ruri)=$fu;     #Copy From URI to Request URI
        $uac_req(furi)=$tu;     #Copy To URI to From URI
        $uac_req(turi)=$fu;     #Copy From URI to To URI
        $uac_req(callid)=$ci;   #Copy Call-ID
                                #Set Content Type to 3GPP USSD
        $uac_req(hdrs)=$uac_req(hdrs) + "Content-Type: application/vnd.3gpp.ussd+xml\r\n";
                                #Set the USSD XML Response body
        $uac_req(body)="<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
        <ussd-data>
                <language value=\"en\"/>
                <ussd-string value=\"Bienvenido. Seleccione una opcion: 1 o 2.\"/>
        </ussd-data>";
        $uac_req(evroute)=1;    #Set the event route to use on return replies
        uac_req_send();         #Send it!
}

So the UAC module generates the 200 OK and sends it back.

“That was quick” I told myself, patting myself on the back before trying it out for the first time.

Huston, we have a problem – Although the Call-ID is the same, it’s not an in-dialog response as the tags aren’t present, this means our UE send back a 405 to the SIP INFO.

Right. Perhaps this is the time to read the Spec…

Okay, so the SIP INFO needs to be in dialog. Can we do that with the UAC module? Perhaps not…

But the Transaction Module ™ in Kamailio exposes and option on the ctl API to generate an in-dialog UAC – this could be perfect…

But alas real life came back to rear its ugly head, and this adventure will have to continue another day…

Update: Thanks to a kindly provided PCAP I now know what I was doing wrong, and so we’ll soon have a follow up to this post named “Successes in cobbling together a USSD Gateway” just as soon as I have a weekend free.

Demystifying SS7 & Sigtran – Part 6 – Calling with ISUP

Mobile Networks, VoIP, , ,

So far in our lab we’ve got connectivity between to points, but we’re not carrying any useful data on top of it.

In the same way that TCP is great, but what makes it really useful is carrying application layers like HTTP on top, MTP3 exists to facilitate carrying higher-layer protocols, like ISUP, MAP, SCCP, etc, so let’s get some traffic onto our network.

ISUP is the ISDN User Part, ISUP is used to setup and teardown calls between two exchanges / SSPs – it’s the oldest and the most simple SS7 application to show off, so that’s what we’ll be working with today.

If you’ve not dealt much with ISDN in the past, then that’s OK – we’re not going to deep dive into all the nitty gritty of how ISDN Signaling works, but we’ll just skim the surface to showing how SS7/Sigtran transports the ISUP packets. So you can see how SS7 is used to transport this protocol.

Very Basic ISDN Signalling

ISUP is used to setup and teardown calls between telephone exchanges, which in SS7 networks, are the Service Switching Points (SSPs) we talked about in this post.

You can think of it a lot like SIP, which is if not the child of ISUP, then it at least bares a striking resemblance.

So let’s look at an ISUP call flow:

The call is initiated with an Initial Address Message (IAM), akin to a SIP INVITE, sent by the SSP/Exchange of the calling party to the SSP/Exchange of the called party.
When the remote party starts to ring, the remote exchange sends an Address Complete (ACM), which is similar to a 100 TRYING in SIP.
Once the remote party answers, the remote exchange sends back an Answer Message (ANM), and our call starts, just like a 200 OK.

Rather than SDP for transferring media, timeslots or predefined channels / circuits are defined, each identified by a number, which both sides will use for the media path.

Finally whichever side terminates the call will send a Release (REL) message, which is confirmed with the Release Complete (RLC).

I told you we’d be quick!

So that’s the basics of ISUP, in our next post we’ll do some PCAP analysis on real world ISUP flows!

SMS-over-IP Message Efficiency – K

IMS / VoLTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, , , ,

Recently I read a post from someone talking about efficiency of USSD over IMS, and how crazy it was that such a small amount of data used so much overhead to get transferred across the network.

Having built an SMSc a while ago, my mind immediately jumped to SMS over IMS as being a great example of having so much overhead.

If we’re to consider sending the response “K” to a text message, how much overhead is there?

SMS PDU containing the message “K”

I’m using a common Qualcomm based smartphone, and here’s the numbers I’ve got from Wireshark when I send the message:

Transport Ethernet Header – 14 Bytes
Transport IP Header – 20 Bytes
Transport UDP Header – 8 Bytes
Transport GTP Header – 12 Bytes
User IP Header – 20 Bytes
IPsec ESP Header (For Um interface protection) – 22 Bytes
Encapsulated UDP Header – 8 Bytes
SIP Headers – 707 Bytes
SMS Header – 16 Bytes
SMS Message Body “K” – 1 Byte

Overall SIP, ESP, GTP and Transport PCAP for SIP MESSAGE

That seems pretty bad in terms of efficiency, but let’s look at how that actually works out:

This means our actual message body makes up just 1 byte of 828 bytes, or 0.12% of the size of the overall payload.

Even combined with the SMS header (which contains all the addressing information needed to route an SMS) it’s still just on 2% of the overall message.

So USSD efficiency isn’t great, but it’s not alone!

Kamailio Diameter Routing Agent Support

IMS / VoLTE, Kamailio, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, Software, VoIP, , , , ,

Recently I’ve been working on open source Diameter Routing Agent implementations (See my posts on FreeDiameter).

With the hurdles to getting a DRA working with open source software covered, the next step was to get all my Diameter traffic routed via the DRAs, however I soon rediscovered a Kamailio limitation regarding support for Diameter Routing Agents.

You see, when Kamailio’s C Diameter Peer module makes a decision as to where to route a request, it looks for the active Diameter peers, and finds a peer with the suitable Vendor and Application IDs in the supported Applications for the Application needed.

Unfortunately, a DRA typically only advertises support for one application – Relay.

This means if you have everything connected via a DRA, Kamailio’s CDP module doesn’t see the Application / Vendor ID for the Diameter application on the DRA, and doesn’t route the traffic to the DRA.

The fix for this was twofold, the first step was to add some logic into Kamailio to determine if the Relay application was advertised in the Capabilities Exchange Request / Answer of the Diameter Peer.

I added the logic to do this and exposed this so you can see if the peer supports Diameter relay when you run “cdp.list_peers”.

With that out of the way, next step was to update the routing logic to not just reject the candidate peer if the Application / Vendor ID for the required application was missing, but to evaluate if the peer supports Diameter Relay, and if it does, keep it in the game.

I added this functionality, and now I’m able to use CDP Peers in Kamailio to allow my P-CSCF, S-CSCF and I-CSCF to route their traffic via a Diameter Routing Agent.

I’ve got a branch with the changes here and will submit a PR to get it hopefully merged into mainline soon.

Ericsson & Nokia RRU Power Connectors – Wiring and Tricks

EUTRAN, Mobile Networks, RF, , ,

Something that’s kind of great is that the current generation of Ericsson RRUs and Nokia RRUs, use the same power connector – The Amphenol “Amphe-OBTS” series connector.

Construction and wiring of these connectors is the same for both, and with one little trick, we can use the connector for both Ericsson and Nokia RRUs (Airscale and later).

This pin that stops the connector from being “universal” but is easily removed.

The connectors are not quite universal, in order to use it in both you need to knock off a small pin on the connector, I’d suggest doing this before you assemble it, put the connector on it’s back, facing upwards, and hit this with a screwdriver / chisel and it’ll pop off with very little effort.

Assembling the connectors starts by working out the diameter of the grommet you need to fit your cable, the connector comes with the grommet for 9-14mm, but in the bag you’ll usually get grommets for 6-9mm cable and 14-18mm cable.

Grab the correct one for your cable diameter, and pop into the black fingered cage (‘gland adapter’) shown in the bottom right of the below photo.

Grommets and gland adapter

Next we line all the parts up along the cable and screw it all together:

The end-cap is actually very useful for stopping the female end of the connector from spinning when you’re assembling the cable, so don’t throw it away!

The finished product

Diameter Routing Agents – Part 5 – AVP Transformations with FreeDiameter and Python in rt_pyform

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, Mobile Networks, Python, SDM, Software, , , , ,

In our last post we talked about why we’d want to perform Diameter AVP translations / rewriting on our Diameter Routing Agent.

Now let’s look at how we can actually achieve this using rt_pyform extension for FreeDiameter and some simple Python code.

Before we build we’ll need to make sure we have the python3-devel package (I’m using python3-devel-3.10) installed.

Then we’ll build FreeDiameter with the rt_pyform, this branch contains the rt_pyform extension in it already, or you can clone the extension only from this repo.

Now once FreeDiameter is installed we can load the extension in our freeDiameter.conf file:

LoadExtension = "rt_pyform.fdx" : "<Your config filename>.conf";

Next we’ll need to define our rt_pyform config, this is a super simple 3 line config file that specifies the path of what we’re doing:

DirectoryPath = "."        # Directory to search
ModuleName = "script"      # Name of python file. Note there is no .py extension
FunctionName = "transform" # Python function to call

The DirectoryPath directive specifies where we should search for the Python code, and ModuleName is the name of the Python script, lastly we have FunctionName which is the name of the Python function that does the rewriting.

Now let’s write our Python function for the transformation.

The Python function much have the correct number of parameters, must return a string, and must use the name specified in the config.

The following is an example of a function that prints out all the values it receives:

def transform(appId, flags, cmdCode, HBH_ID, E2E_ID, AVP_Code, vendorID, value):
    print('[PYTHON]')
    print(f'|-> appId: {appId}')
    print(f'|-> flags: {hex(flags)}')
    print(f'|-> cmdCode: {cmdCode}')
    print(f'|-> HBH_ID: {hex(HBH_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> E2E_ID: {hex(E2E_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> AVP_Code: {AVP_Code}')
    print(f'|-> vendorID: {vendorID}')
    print(f'|-> value: {value}')
    
    return value

Note the order of the arguments and that return is of the same type as the AVP value (string).

We can expand upon this and add conditionals, let’s take a look at some more complex examples:

def transform(appId, flags, cmdCode, HBH_ID, E2E_ID, AVP_Code, vendorID, value):
    print('[PYTHON]')
    print(f'|-> appId: {appId}')
    print(f'|-> flags: {hex(flags)}')
    print(f'|-> cmdCode: {cmdCode}')
    print(f'|-> HBH_ID: {hex(HBH_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> E2E_ID: {hex(E2E_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> AVP_Code: {AVP_Code}')
    print(f'|-> vendorID: {vendorID}')
    print(f'|-> value: {value}')
    #IMSI Translation - if App ID = 16777251 and the AVP being evaluated is the Username
    if (int(appId) == 16777251) and int(AVP_Code) == 1:
        print("This is IMSI '" + str(value) + "' - Evaluating transformation")
        print("Original value: " + str(value))
        value = str(value[::-1]).zfill(15)

The above look at if the App ID is S6a, and the AVP being checked is AVP Code 1 (Username / IMSI ) and if so, reverses the username, so IMSI 1234567 becomes 7654321, the zfill is just to pad with leading 0s if required.

Now let’s do another one for a Realm Rewrite:

def transform(appId, flags, cmdCode, HBH_ID, E2E_ID, AVP_Code, vendorID, value):

    #Print Debug Info
    print('[PYTHON]')
    print(f'|-> appId: {appId}')
    print(f'|-> flags: {hex(flags)}')
    print(f'|-> cmdCode: {cmdCode}')
    print(f'|-> HBH_ID: {hex(HBH_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> E2E_ID: {hex(E2E_ID)}')
    print(f'|-> AVP_Code: {AVP_Code}')
    print(f'|-> vendorID: {vendorID}')
    print(f'|-> value: {value}')
    #Realm Translation
    if int(AVP_Code) == 283:
        print("This is Destination Realm '" + str(value) + "' - Evaluating transformation")
    if value == "epc.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org":
        new_realm = "epc.mnc999.mcc999.3gppnetwork.org"
        print("translating from " + str(value) + " to " + str(new_realm))
        value = new_realm
    else:
        #If the Realm doesn't match the above conditions, then don't change anything
        print("No modification made to Realm as conditions not met")
    print("Updated Value: " + str(value))

In the above block if the Realm is set to epc.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org it is rewritten to epc.mnc999.mcc999.3gppnetwork.org, hopefully you can get a handle on the sorts of transformations we can do with this – We can translate any string type AVPs, which allows for hostname, realm, IMSI, Sh-User-Data, Location-Info, etc, etc, to be rewritten.

NB-IoT NIDD Basics

EPC, EUTRAN, LTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, Software, , , , , , ,

NB-IoT introduces support for NIDD – Non-IP Data Delivery (NIDD) which is one of the cool features of NB-IoT that’s gaining more widespread adoption.

Let’s take a deep dive into NIDD.

The case against IP for IoT

In the over 40 years since IP was standardized, we’ve shoehorned many things onto IP, but IP was never designed or optimized for low power, low throughput applications.

For the battery life of an IoT device to be measured in years, it has to be very selective about what power hungry operations it does. Transmitting data over the air is one of the most power-intensive operations an IoT device can perform, so we need to do everything we can to limit how much data is sent, and how frequently.

Use Case – NB-IoT Tap

Let’s imagine we’re launching an IoT tap that transmits information about water used, as part of our revolutionary new “Water as a Service” model (WaaS) which removes the capex for residents building their own water treatment plant in their homes, and instead allows dynamic scaling of waterloads as they move to our new opex model.

If I turn on the tap and use 12L of water, when I turn off the tap, our IoT tap encodes the usage onto a single byte and sends the usage information to our rain-cloud service provider.

So we’re not constantly changing the batteries in our taps, we need to send this one byte of data as efficiently as possible, so as to maximize the battery life.

If we were to transport our data on TCP, well we’d need a 3 way handshake and several messages just to transmit the data we want to send.

Let’s see how our one byte of data would look if we transported it on TCP.

That sliver of blue in the diagram is our usage component, the rest is overhead used to get it there. Seems wasteful huh?

Sure, TCP isn’t great for this you say, you should use UDP! But even if we moved away from TCP to UDP, we’ve still got the IPv4 header and the UDP header wasting 28 bytes.

For efficiency’s sake (To keep our batteries lasting as long as possible) we want to send as few messages as possible, and where we do have to send messages, keep them very short, so IP is not a great fit here.

Enter NIDD – Non-IP Data Delivery.

Through NIDD we can just send the single hex byte, only be charged for the single hex byte, and only stay transmitting long enough to send this single byte of hex (Plus the NBIoT overheads / headers).

Compared to UDP transport, NIDD provides us a reduction of 28 bytes of overhead for each message, or a 96% reduction in message size, which translates to real power savings for our IoT device.

In summary – the more sending your device has to do, the more battery it consumes.
So in a scenario where you’re trying to maximize power efficiency to keep your batter powered device running as long as possible, needing to transmit 28 bytes of wasted data to transport 1 byte of usable data, is a real waste.

Delivering the Payload

NIDD traffic is transported as raw hex data end to end, this means for our 1 byte of water usage data, the device would just send the hex value to be transferred and it’d pop out the other end.

To support this we introduce a new network element called the SCEF –Service Capability Exposure Function.

From a developer’s perspective, the SCEF is the gateway to our IoT devices. Through the RESTful API on the SCEF (T8 API), we can send and receive raw hex data to any of our IoT devices.

When one of our Water-as-a-Service Taps sends usage data as a hex byte, it’s the software talking on the T8 API to the SCEF that receives this data.

Data of course needs to be addressed, so we know where it’s coming from / going to, and T8 handles this, as well as message reliability, etc, etc.

This is a telco blog, so we should probably cover the MME connection, the MME talks via Diameter to the SCEF. In our next post we’ll go into these signaling flows in more detail.

If you’re wondering what the status of Open Source SCEF implementations are, then you may have already guessed I’m working on one!

Hopefully by now you’ve got a bit of an idea of how NIDD works in NB-IoT, and in our next posts we’ll dig deeper into the flows and look at some PCAPs together.

Diameter Routing Agents – Part 5 – AVP Transformations

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, SDM, Software, , , , , , ,

Having a central pair of Diameter routing agents allows us to drastically simplify our network, but what if we want to perform some translations on AVPs?

For starters, what is an AVP transformation? Well it’s simply rewriting the value of an AVP as the Diameter Request/Response passes through the DRA. A request may come into the DRA with IMSI xxxxxx and leave with IMSI yyyyyy if a translation is applied.

So why would we want to do this?

Well, what if we purchased another operator who used Realm X, and we use Realm Y, and we want to link the two networks, then we’d need to rewrite Realm Y to Realm X, and Realm X to Realm Y when they communicate, AVP transformations allow for this.

If we’re an MVNO with hosted IMSIs from an MNO, but want to keep just the one IMSI in our HSS/OCS, we can translate from the MNO hosted IMSI to our internal IMSI, using AVP transformations.

If our OCS supports only one rating group, and we want to rewrite all rating groups to that one value, AVP transformations cover this too.

There are lots of uses for this, and if you’ve worked with a bit of signaling before you’ll know that quite often these sorts of use-cases come up.

So how do we do this with freeDiameter?

To handle this I developed a module for passing each AVP to a Python function, which can then apply any transformation to a text based value, using every tool available to you in Python.

In the next post I’ll introduce rt_pyform and how we can use it with Python to translate Diameter AVPs.

Diameter Routing Agents – Part 4 – Advanced FreeDiameter DRA Routing

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, SDM, Software, , , , , ,

Way back in part 2 we discussed the basic routing logic a DRA handles, but what if we want to do something a bit outside of the box in terms of how we route?

For me, one of the most useful use cases for a DRA is to route traffic based on IMSI / Username.
This means I can route all the traffic for MVNO X to MVNO X’s HSS, or for staging / test subs to the test HSS enviroment.

FreeDiameter has a bunch of built in logic that handles routing based on a weight, but we can override this, using the rt_default module.

In our last post we had this module commented out, but let’s uncomment it and start playing with it:

#Basic Diameter config for this box
Identity = "dra.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";
Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";
Port = 3868;

LoadExtension = "dbg_msg_dumps.fdx" : "0x8888";
LoadExtension = "rt_redirect.fdx":"0x0080";
LoadExtension = "rt_default.fdx":"rt_default.conf";

TLS_Cred = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem", "/etc/freeDiameter/privkey.pem";
TLS_CA = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem";
TLS_DH_File = "/etc/freeDiameter/dh.pem";

ConnectPeer = "mme01.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" { ConnectTo = "10.98.0.10"; No_TLS; };
ConnectPeer = "hss01" { ConnectTo = "10.0.1.252"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
ConnectPeer = "hss02" { ConnectTo = "10.0.1.253"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
ConnectPeer = "hss-mvno-x" { ConnectTo = "10.98.0.22"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
ConnectPeer = "hss-lab" { ConnectTo = "10.0.2.2"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};

In the above code we’ve uncommented rt_default and rt_redirect.

You’ll notice that rt_default references a config file, so we’ll create a new file in our /etc/freeDiameter directory called rt_default.conf, and this is where the magic will happen.

A few points before we get started:

  • This overrides the default routing priorities, but in order for a peer to be selected, it has to be in an Open (active) state
  • The peer still has to have advertised support for the requested application in the CER/CEA dialog
  • The peers will still need to have all been defined in the freeDiameter.conf file in order to be selected

So with that in mind, and the 5 peers we have defined in our config above (assuming all are connected), let’s look at some rules we can setup using rt_default.

Intro to rt_default Rules

The rt_default.conf file contains a list of rules, each rule has a criteria that if matched, will result in the specified action being taken. The actions all revolve around how to route the traffic.

So what can these criteria match on?
Here’s the options:

Item to MatchCode
Any*
Origin-Hostoh=”STR/REG”
Origin-Realmor=”STR/REG”
Destination-Hostdh=”STR/REG”
Destination-Realmdr=”STR/REG”
User-Nameun=”STR/REG”
Session-Idsi=”STR/REG”
rt_default Matching Criteria

We can either match based on a string or a regex, for example, if we want to match anything where the Destination-Realm is “mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org” we’d use something like:

#Low score to HSS02
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += -70 ;

Now you’ll notice there is some stuff after this, let’s look at that.

We’re matching anything where the destination-host is set to hss02 (that’s the bit before the colon), but what’s the bit after that?

Well if we imagine that all our Diameter peers are up, when a message comes in with Destination-Realm “mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org”, looking for an HSS, then in our example setup, we have 4 HHS instances to choose from (assuming they’re all online).

In default Diameter routing, all of these peers are in the same realm, and as they’re all HSS instances, they all support the same applications – Our request could go to any of them.

But what we set in the above example is simply the following:

If the Destination-Realm is set to mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org, then set the priority for routing to hss02 to the lowest possible value.

So that leaves the 3 other Diameter peers with a higher score than HSS02, so HSS02 won’t be used.

Let’s steer this a little more,

Let’s specify that we want to use HSS01 to handle all the requests (if it’s available), we can do that by adding a rule like this:

#Low score to HSS02
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += -70 ;
#High score to HSS01
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss01" += 100 ;

But what if we want to route to hss-lab if the IMSI matches a specific value, well we can do that too.

#Low score to HSS02
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += -70 ;
#High score to HSS01
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss01" += 100 ;
#Route traffic for IMSI to Lab HSS
un="001019999999999999" : dh="hss-lab" += 200 ;

Now that we’ve set an entry with a higher score than hss01 that will be matched if the username (IMSI) equals 001019999999999999, the traffic will get routed to hss-lab.

But that’s a whole IMSI, what if we want to match only part of a field?

Well, we can use regex in the Criteria as well, so let’s look at using some Regex, let’s say for example all our MVNO SIMs start with 001012xxxxxxx, let’s setup a rule to match that, and route to the MVNO HSS with a higher priority than our normal HSS:

#Low score to HSS02
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += -70 ;
#High score to HSS01
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss01" += 100 ;
#Route traffic for IMSI to Lab HSS
un="001019999999999999" : dh="hss-lab" += 200 ;
#Route traffic where IMSI starts with 001012 to MVNO HSS
un=["^001012.*"] : dh="hss-mvno-x" += 200 ;

Let’s imagine that down the line we introduce HSS03 and HSS04, and we only want to use HSS01 if HSS03 and HSS04 are unavailable, and only to use HSS02 no other HSSes are available, and we want to split the traffic 50/50 across HSS03 and HSS04.

Firstly we’d need to add HSS03 and HSS04 to our FreeDiameter.conf file:

...
ConnectPeer = "hss02" { ConnectTo = "10.0.1.253"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
ConnectPeer = "hss03" { ConnectTo = "10.0.3.3"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
ConnectPeer = "hss04" { ConnectTo = "10.0.4.4"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};
...

Then in our rt_default.conf we’d need to tweak our scores again:

#Low score to HSS02
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += 10 ;
#Medium score to HSS01
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss01" += 20 ;
#Route traffic for IMSI to Lab HSS
un="001019999999999999" : dh="hss-lab" += 200 ;
#Route traffic where IMSI starts with 001012 to MVNO HSS
un=["^001012.*"] : dh="hss-mvno-x" += 200 ;
#High Score for HSS03 and HSS04
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss02" += 100 ;
dr="mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" : dh="hss04" += 100 ;

One quick tip to keep your logic a bit simpler, is that we can set a variety of different values based on keywords (listed below) rather than on a weight/score:

BehaviourNameScore
Do not deliver to peer (set lowest priority)NO_DELIVERY-70
The peer is a default route for all messagesDEFAULT5
The peer is a default route for this realmDEFAULT_REALM10
REALM15
Route to the specified Host with highest priorityFINALDEST100
Rather than manually specifying the store you can use keywords like above to set the value

In our next post we’ll look at using FreeDiameter based DRA in roaming scenarios where we route messages across Diameter Realms.

Diameter Routing Agents – Part 3 – Building a DRA with FreeDiameter

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, SDM, Software, , ,

I’ve covered the basics of Diameter Routing Agents (DRAs) in the past, and even shared an unstable DRA built using Kamailio, but today I thought I’d cover building something a little more “production ready”.

FreeDiameter has been around for a while, and we’ve covered configuring the FreeDiameter components in Open5GS when it comes to the S6a interface, so you may have already come across FreeDiameter in the past, but been left a bit baffled as to how to get it to actually do something.

FreeDiameter is a FOSS implimentation of the Diameter protocol stack, and is predominantly used as a building point for developers to build Diameter applications on top of.

But for our scenario, we’ll just be using plain FreeDiameter.

So let’s get into it,

You’ll need FreeDiameter installed, and you’ll need a certificate for your FreeDiameter instance, more on that in this post.

Once that’s setup we’ll need to define some basics,

Inside freeDiameter.conf we’ll need to include the identity of our DRA, load the extensions and reference the certificate files:

#Basic Diameter config for this box
Identity = "dra.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";
Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";
Port = 3868;

LoadExtension = "dbg_msg_dumps.fdx" : "0x8888";
#LoadExtension = "rt_redirect.fdx":"0x0080";
#LoadExtension = "rt_default.fdx":"rt_default.conf";

TLS_Cred = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem", "/etc/freeDiameter/privkey.pem";
TLS_CA = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem";
TLS_DH_File = "/etc/freeDiameter/dh.pem";

Next up we’ll need to define the Diameter peers we’ll be routing between.

For each connection / peer / host we’ll need to define here:

ConnectPeer = "mme01.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org" { ConnectTo = "10.98.0.10"; No_TLS; };
ConnectPeer = "hss01" { ConnectTo = "10.0.1.252"; No_TLS; Port = 3868; Realm = "mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org";};

And we’ll configure our HSS and MME defined in the ConnectPeers to connect/accept connections from, dra.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org.

Now if we start freeDiameter, we can start routing between the hosts. No config needed.

If we define another HSS in the ConnectPeers, any S6a requests from the MME may get routed to that as well (50/50 split).

In our next post, we’ll look at using the rt_default extension to control how we route and look at some more advanced use cases.

Diameter Routing Agents (Why you need them, and how to build them) – Part 2 – Routing

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, SDM, , , , , ,

What I typically refer to as Diameter interfaces / reference points, such as S6a, Sh, Sx, Sy, Gx, Gy, Zh, etc, etc, are also known as Applications.

Diameter Application Support

If you look inside the Capabilities Exchange Request / Answer dialog, what you’ll see is each side advertising the Applications (interfaces) that they support, each one being identified by an Application ID.

CER showing support for the 3GPP Zh Application-ID (Interface)

If two peers share a common Application-Id, then they can communicate using that Application / Interface.

For example, the above screenshot shows a peer with support for the Zh Interface (Spoiler alert, XCAP Gateway / BSF coming soon!). If two Diameter peers both have support for the Zh interface, then they can use that to send requests / responses to each other.

This is the basis of Diameter Routing.

Diameter Routing Tables

Like any router, our DRA needs to have logic to select which peer to route each message to.

For each Diameter connection to our DRA, it will build up a Diameter Routing table, with information on each peer, including the realm and applications it advertises support for.

Then, based on the logic defined in the DRA to select which Diameter peer to route each request to.

In its simplest form, Diameter routing is based on a few things:

  1. Look at the DestinationRealm, and see if we have any peers at that realm
  2. If we do then look at the DestinationHost, if that’s set, and the host is connected, and if it supports the specified Application-Id, then route it to that host
  3. If no DestinationHost is specified, look at the peers we have available and find the one that supports the specified Application-Id, then route it to that host
Simplified Diameter Routing Table used by DRAs

With this in mind, we can go back to looking at how our DRA may route a request from a connected MME towards an HSS.

Let’s look at some examples of this at play.

The request from MME02 is for DestinationRealm mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org, which our DRA knows it has 4 connected peers in (3 if we exclude the source of the request, as we don’t want to route it back to itself of course).

So we have 3 contenders still for who could get the request, but wait! We have a DestinationHost specified, so the DRA confirms the host is available, and that it supports the requested ApplicationId and routes it to HSS02.

So just because we are going through a DRA does not mean we can’t specific which destination host we need, just like we would if we had a direct link between each Diameter peer.

Conversely, if we sent another S6a request from MME01 but with no DestinationHost set, let’s see how that would look.

Again, the request is from MME02 is for DestinationRealm mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org, which our DRA knows it has 3 other peers it could route this to. But only two of those peers support the S6a Application, so the request would be split between the two peers evenly.

Clever Routing with DRAs

So with our DRA in place we can simplify the network, we don’t need to build peer links between every Diameter device to every other, but let’s look at some other ways DRAs can help us.

Load Control

We may want to always send requests to HSS01 and only use HSS02 if HSS01 is not available, we can do this with a DRA.

Or we may want to split load 75% on one HSS and 25% on the other.

Both are great use cases for a DRA.

Routing based on Username

We may want to route requests in the DRA based on other factors, such as the IMSI.

Our IMSIs may start with 001010001xxx, but if we introduced an MVNO with IMSIs starting with 001010002xxx, we’d need to know to route all traffic where the IMSI belongs to the home network to the home network HSS, and all the MVNO IMSI traffic to the MVNO’s HSS, and DRAs handle this.

Inter-Realm Routing

One of the main use cases you’ll see for DRAs is in Roaming scenarios.

For example, if we have a roaming agreement with a subscriber who’s IMSIs start with 90170, we can route all the traffic for their subs towards their HSS.

But wait, their Realm will be mnc901.mcc070.3gppnetwork.org, so in that scenario we’ll need to add a rule to route the request to a different realm.

DRAs handle this also.

In our next post we’ll start actually setting up a DRA with a default route table, and then look at some more advanced options for Diameter routing like we’ve just discussed.

One slight caveat, is that mutual support does not always mean what you may expect.
For example an MME and an HSS both support S6a, which is identified by Auth-Application-Id 16777251 (Vendor ID 10415), but one is a client and one is a server.
Keep this in mind!

Diameter Routing Agents (Why you need them, and how to build them) – Part 1

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, RFCs & Standards, SDM, , , , ,

Answer Question 1: Because they make things simpler and more flexible for your Diameter traffic.
Answer Question 2: With free software of course!

All about DRAs

But let’s dive a little deeper. Let’s look at the connection between an MME and an HSS (the S6a interface).

Direct Diameter link between two Diameter Peers

We configure the Diameter peers on MME1 and HSS01 so they know about each other and how to communicate, the link comes up and presto, away we go.

But we’re building networks here! N+1 redundancy and all that, so now we have two HSSes and two MMEs.

Direct Diameter link between 4 Diameter peers

Okay, bit messy, but that’s okay…

But then our network grows to 10 MMEs, and 3 HSSes and you can probably see where this is going, but let’s drive the point home.

Direct Diameter connections for a network with 10x MME and 3x HSS

Now imagine once you’ve set all this up you need to do some maintenance work on HSS03, so need to shut down the Diameter peer on 10 different MMEs in order to isolate it and deisolate it.

The problem here is pretty evident, all those links are messy, cumbersome and they just don’t scale.

If you’re someone with a bit of networking experience (and let’s face it, you’re here after all), then you’re probably thinking “What if we just had a central system to route all the Diameter messages?”

An Agent that could Route Diameter, a Diameter Routing Agent perhaps…

By introducing a DRA we build Diameter peer links between each of our Diameter devices (MME / HSS, etc) and the DRA, rather than directly between each peer.

With Diameter Routing Agent

Then from the DRA we can route Diameter requests and responses between them.

Let’s go back to our 10x MME and 3x HSS network and see how it looks with a DRA instead.

So much cleaner!

Not only does this look better, but it makes our life operating the network a whole lot easier.

Each MME sends their S6a traffic to the DRA, which finds a healthy HSS from the 3 and sends the requests to it, and relays the responses as well.

We can do clever load balancing now as well.

Plus if a peer goes down, the DRA detects the failure and just routes to one of the others.

If we were to introduce a new HSS, we wouldn’t need to configure anything on the MMEs, just add HSS04 to the DRA and it’ll start getting traffic.

Plus from an operations standpoint, now if we want to to take an HSS offline for maintenance, we just shut down the link on the HSS and all HSS traffic will get routed to the other two HSS instances.

In our next post we’ll talk about the Routing part of the DRA, how the decisions are made and all the nuances, and then in the following post we’ll actually build a DRA and start routing some traffic around!

Filtering for 3GPP DNS in Wireshark

5G SA, EPC, IMS / VoLTE, LTE, Mobile Networks, VoIP, , , , ,

If you work with IMS or Packet Core, there’s a good chance you need DNS to work, and it doesn’t always.

When I run traces, I’ve always found I get swamped with DNS traffic, UE traffic, OS monitoring, updates, etc, all combine into a big firehose – while my Wireshark filters for finding EPC and IMS traffic is pretty good, my achilles heel has always been filtering the DNS traffic to just get the queries and responses I want out of it.

Well, today I made that a bit better.

By adding this to your Wireshark filter:

dns contains 33:67:70:70:6e:65:74:77:6f:72:6b:03:6f:72:67:00

You’ll only see DNS Queries and Responses for domains at the 3gppnetwork.org domain.

This makes my traces much easier to read, and hopefully will do the same for you!

Bonus, here’s my current Wireshark filter for working EPC/IMS:

(diameter and diameter.cmd.code != 280) or  (sip and !(sip.Method == "OPTIONS") and !(sip.CSeq.method == "OPTIONS")) or (smpp and (smpp.command_id != 0x00000015 and smpp.command_id != 0x80000015)) or (mgcp and !(mgcp.req.verb == "AUEP") and !(mgcp.rsp.rspcode == 500)) or isup or sccp or rtpevent or s1ap or gtpv2 or pfcp or (dns contains 33:67:70:70:6e:65:74:77:6f:72:6b:03:6f:72:67:00)

FreeDiameter – Generating Certificates

EPC, IMS / VoLTE, Mobile Networks, SDM, , , ,

Even if you’re not using TLS in your FreeDiameter instance, you’ll still need a certificate in order to start the stack.

Luckily, creating a self-signed certificate is pretty simple,

Firstly we generate your a private key and public certificate for our required domain – in the below example I’m using dra01.epc.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org, but you’ll need to replace that with the domain name of your freeDiameter instance.

openssl req -new -batch -x509 -days 3650 -nodes     \
   -newkey rsa:1024 -out /etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem -keyout /etc/freeDiameter/privkey.pem \
   -subj /CN=dra01.epc.mnc001.mcc001.3gppnetwork.org

Next we generate a new set of Diffie-Hellman parameter set using OpenSSL.

openssl dhparam -out /etc/freeDiameter/dh.pem 1024

Lastly we’ll put all this config into the freeDiameter config file:

TLS_Cred = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem", "/etc/freeDiameter/privkey.pem";
TLS_CA = "/etc/freeDiameter/cert.pem";
TLS_DH_File = "/etc/freeDiameter/dh.pem";

If you’re using freeDiameter as part of another software stack (Such as Open5Gs) the below filenames will contain the config for that particular freeDiameter components of the stack:

  • freeDiameter.conf – Vanilla freeDiameter
  • mme.conf – Open5Gs MME
  • pcrf.conf – Open5Gs PCRF
  • smf.conf – Open5Gs SMF / P-GW-C
  • hss.conf – Open5Gs HSS

Cisco ITP / SS7 STP – Viewing MTP3 traffic from TDM Links

Mobile Networks, SDM, Software, VoIP, , , , ,

Okay, so a little late to the party on this one…

The other day I had to setup a TDM (E1) based SS7 link (oh yes my friend – they still exist) to interconnect with another operator.

I’m using Cisco’s ITP product as the STP / Signaling Gateway, and my trusty port mirror for what’s going on doesn’t extend down to TDM links.

But I found out you can mirror MTP3 traffic from TDM links in the STP!

Firstly we’ve got to define the remote destination to send the TDM mirrored traffic to, and an access list to match all SS7 traffic:

cs7 paklog your.ip.for.sniffing dest-port 514
access-list 2700 instance 0 permit all

Next up we start a debug session for traffic matching that access list:

debug cs7 mtp3 paklog 2700

And then over on your monitoring box (the IP you specified in your.ip.for.sniffing ) fire up Wireshark and voila!

All our MTP3 traffic!

This was super useful for ensuring the ITP was working correctly as a signaling gateway and passing the M3UA packets over onto MTP3 MSUs.