Securing the User Equipment (UE) in LTE Networks by Detecting Fake Base Stations
Alanoud Al Mazroa1, Mohammed Arozullah2
1Alanoud Al Mazroa, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C 20064.
2Mohammed Arozullah, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C 20064
Manuscript received on January 02, 2014. | Revised Manuscript received on January 04, 2014. | Manuscript published on January 05, 2014. | PP: 94-97 | Volume-4 Issue-6, January 2014. | Retrieval Number: F2479014615/2015©BEIESP
Open Access | Ethics and Policies | Cite
© 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: An LTE network attacker can set up rogue base station easily to make the victim user equipment (UE) connect to such base station. The privacy of the UE will be compromised. In this paper, we propose a protocol to identify fake base stations to protect user privacy. The basic idea is to synchronize to all base stations in range and collect the network IDs. Based on the fact that legitimate base stations have the same network ID that is different from fake ones, the UE can connect to the legitimate base station with the strongest power instead of any base station with the strongest power in traditional design. Our proposed protocol is a UE side solution and no base station modification is required. This property makes our protocol can be gradually deployed in the future. 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 always connect to the legitimate base station with the strongest power.
Keywords: LTE network attacker, NS3, UE, IDs, protocol.