Identifying the Fake Base Station: A Location Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes location-based schemes to detect fake base stations in wireless networks, significantly reducing the success rate of FBS attacks by utilizing signal strength and cooperation strategies.

Contribution

Introduces two novel location-aware FBS-resistance schemes and a cooperation-aided method to enhance detection and reduce false connections in wireless security.

Findings

The proposed schemes greatly reduce the successful cheating rate (SCR).

The cooperation-aided method further suppresses SCR when signals are similar.

Performance improves notably with increased FBS transmit power.

Abstract

Fake base station (FBS) attack is a great security challenge to wireless user equipment (UE). During the cell selection stage, the UE receives multiple synchronization signals (SSs) from multiple nearby base stations (BSs), and then synchronizes itself with the strongest SS. A FBS also can transmit a SS with sufficient power to confuse the UE, which makes the UE connect to the FBS, and may lead to the leakage of private information. In this letter, countermeasure to the FBS attack by utilizing the location information is investigated. Two location awareness based FBS-resistance schemes are proposed by checking the received signal strength according to the position of the UE and a legitimate BS map. The successful cheating rate (SCR) definded as the probability that the UE will connect to the FBS is investigated. Numeric results show that with the two proposed schemes, the SCR can be greatly reduced especially when the transmit power of the FBS is large. Beyond that, a cooperation aided method is further proposed to improve the performance, and we show that the cooperation aided method can further suppress the SCR when the signal strength from the FBS is similar to that from the legitimate BS.