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Observation-based detection of femtocell attacks in wireless mobile networks

Published: 03 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Nowadays, the emergence of femtocells is of great interest to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to improve their radio coverage and financial revenue. However, these low-cost base stations may introduce several security issues that do not only threaten the MNO infrastructure, but could also violate the subscribers' privacy. Moreover, with the recent smartphone developments, the MNOs can use these devices as resources-rich sensors to collect and monitor relevant security data, and detect attacks on femtocells.
This paper proposes a novel architecture where a set of observer agents deployed on smartphones can collect, monitor and deliver radio sensitive events in related to attacks executed on/over femtocells. A secure signalling protocol is also established between observers and a remote observation data management server to exchange data in a secure manner. Observer-based detection techniques are also proposed to detect threats from femtocells in order to protect the MNO infrastructure, and improve the customer experience. A case study considering two security attacks on real deployed femtocells is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.

References

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Arapinis, M., Mancini, L., Ritter, E., Ryan, M., Golde, N., Redon, K., and Borgaonkar, R. New privacy issues in mobile telephony: fix and verification. In Proc of CCS (NC, USA, 2012).
[2]
Borgaonkar, R., Redon, K., and Seifert, J.-P. Security analysis of a femtocell device. In Proc of SINCONF (Sydney, Australia, 2011).
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Chien-Ming, C., Yao-Hsin, C., Yue-Hsun, L., and Hung-Min, S. Eliminating rouge femtocells based on distance bounding protocol and geographic information. Expert Systems with Applications 41, 2 (2014), 426--433.
[4]
Gelenbe, E., Gorbil, G., Tzovaras, D., Liebergeld, S., Garcia, D., Baltatu, M., and Lyberopoulos, G. Security for smart mobile networks: The nemesys approach. In Proc of PRISMS (NJ, USA, 2013).
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Liebergeld, S., Lange, M., and Borgaonkar, R. Cellpot: a concept for next generation cellular network honeypots. In Proc of NDSS (CA, USA, 2014).
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Nico, G., Kevin, R., and Ravishankar, B. Weaponizing femtocells: The effect of rogue devices on mobile telecommunications. In Proc of NDSS (CA, USA, 2012).

Cited By

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  • (2020)Cloud Based Cyber Security Defense of Smart Meters2020 International Conference on Virtual Reality and Intelligent Systems (ICVRIS)10.1109/ICVRIS51417.2020.00132(532-535)Online publication date: Jul-2020
  • (2019)Scalable and Secure Mobile Sensor Cloud Architecture for the Delivery of Surveillance Applications As A ServiceProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia10.1145/3365921.3365943(56-65)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2019
  • (2018)Survey of Public Safety Communications: User-Side and Network-Side Solutions and Future DirectionsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28797606(70397-70425)Online publication date: 2018
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '17: Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2017
2004 pages
ISBN:9781450344869
DOI:10.1145/3019612
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 April 2017

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Author Tags

  1. femtocell
  2. mobile security
  3. security attacks
  4. smartphone
  5. wireless networking

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  • Research-article

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SAC 2017
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SAC 2017: Symposium on Applied Computing
April 3 - 7, 2017
Marrakech, Morocco

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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SAC '25
The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 31 - April 4, 2025
Catania , Italy

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Cloud Based Cyber Security Defense of Smart Meters2020 International Conference on Virtual Reality and Intelligent Systems (ICVRIS)10.1109/ICVRIS51417.2020.00132(532-535)Online publication date: Jul-2020
  • (2019)Scalable and Secure Mobile Sensor Cloud Architecture for the Delivery of Surveillance Applications As A ServiceProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia10.1145/3365921.3365943(56-65)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2019
  • (2018)Survey of Public Safety Communications: User-Side and Network-Side Solutions and Future DirectionsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28797606(70397-70425)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2018)A Context-Based Model for Validating the Ability of Cyber Systems to Defend Against AttacksUbiquitous Networking10.1007/978-3-030-02849-7_27(295-307)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2018
  • (2018)Game-Based Data Muling as a Service in Infrastructureless AreaAd-hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks10.1007/978-3-030-00247-3_25(280-292)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2018

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