Secure Handover Management Against False Base Station Attacks

Abstract

False Base Station attack raises concerns about data privacy during handover process in 5G networks. Broadcasting of measurement reports unveils the need for security assessment since a false base station can send a stronger signal to the User Equipment (UE) to establish a connection with itself. This may cause the leakage of information. Thus, a fundamental solution is to protect measurement reports with encryption algorithms. In this paper, we identify the security vulnerabilities of handover process and simulate a scenario, where a false base station is deployed and UEs can be connected to it during handover process. To prevent this, we propose a secure handover scheme to protect measurement reports by using two encryption algorithms; (i) Advanced Encryption Algorithm (AES)-256, and (ii) Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) Algorithm. Then, we analyze the computation time and show the secure connection to a legitimate base station during the handover process.