CVE-2019-18659 — The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) protocol allows remote attackers to spoof a

The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) protocol allows remote attackers to spoof a Presidential Alert because cryptographic authentication is not used, as demonstrated by MessageIdentifier 4370 in LTE System Information Block 12 (aka SIB12). NOTE: testing inside an RF-isolated shiel

01What is this vulnerability?

The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) protocol allows remote attackers to spoof a Presidential Alert because cryptographic authentication is not used, as demonstrated by MessageIdentifier 4370 in LTE System Information Block 12 (aka SIB12). NOTE: testing inside an RF-isolated shield box suggested that all LTE phones are affected by design (e.g., use of Android versus iOS does not matter); testing…

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2019-11-02T00:49:21.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-05T01:54:14.527Z

09References

• dl.acm.org — https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3326082