Detection and Remediation of Attack by Fake Base Stations in LTE Networks
Alanoud Al Mazroa1, Mohammed Arozullah2
1Alanoud Al Mazroa, The Catholic University of America, Washington, India.
2Mohammed Arozullah, The Catholic University of America, Washington, India.
Manuscript received on April 17, 2015. | Revised Manuscript received on April 28, 2015. | Manuscript published on March 05, 2015. | PP: 12-15 | Volume-5, Issue-2, May 2015. | Retrieval Number: B2576055215/2015©BEIESP
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©The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Abstract: Rogue base station attack can compromise the privacy of user equipment (UE) in LTE networks. To address this issue, we propose a rogue base station identification protocol to protect UE privacy. Our protocol utilizes the mobile property of the UE and is designed based on the observation that rogue base station can only cover a small area. We use the measurements of UE in different locations to estimate the power and location of the base stations. The UE also tracks the signatures of each legitimate base station. If the base station is already verified by the detection protocol, then the UE connects to the base station according to LTE standard. For any new appearing base stations, it sends the power of the base station and the GPS location itself to a cloud server to verify the legitimacy of the base station. The cloud server maintains a database of real base stations. Our proposed protocol does not need to change existing LTE standard and no base station modification is required. Our protocol is implemented on NS3 LTE module and evaluated with various practical settings. The results indicate our protocol can ensure that the UE can successfully detect rogue base stations and avoid sending privacy data to rogue base station.
Keywords: User equipment (UE) in LTE networks, identification protocol to protect UE privacy, GPS, legitimacy, NS3 LTE module.