Design and Experimental Assessment of Detection Schemes for Air Interface Attacks in Adverse Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper introduces three detection schemes using likelihood ratio tests to identify air interface attacks in cellular networks, including noise jamming and rogue base station activation, validated through LTE SDR experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents novel detection schemes based on likelihood ratio tests that can be implemented with off-the-shelf receivers for air interface attack detection.

Findings

Effective detection of air interface threats demonstrated

High probability of attack detection confirmed

Applicable to LTE systems with SDR experimentation

Abstract

In this letter, we propose three schemes designed to detect attacks over the air interface in cellular networks. These decision rules rely on the generalized likelihood ratio test, and are fed by data that can be acquired using common off-the-shelf receivers. In addition to more classical (barrage/smart) noise jamming attacks, we further assess the capability of the proposed schemes to detect the stealthy activation of a rogue base station. The evaluation is carried out through an experimentation of a LTE system concretely reproduced using Software-Defined Radios. Illustrative examples confirm that the proposed schemes can effectively detect air interface threats with high probability.