Fake Base Station Detection and Localization in 5G Network: A Proof of Concept

One of the key features adopted in 5G network to achieve the requirements is the new millimeter-wave radio signal, which has limited coverage and low power penetration in nature. Consequently, there will be relatively more number of base station that will be deployed, thus, makes the transfer of point of attachments more frequent that its predecessors in achieving continuous connectivity of a user equipment (UE). Unfortunately, this scenario opens new security challenge against Fake base station, in which UEs can be at risk when transferred to these base stations. The aim of this study is to mitigate UE attachments against fake base stations through threshold-based detection and localization. The detection results showed low errors in various test scenarios. The proposed detection method achieved 95.94% precision, 100% recall, and 96.40% accuracy. Also, the proposed localization technique effectively locates the Fake Base Stations with low percentage errors. In both method, the UE quantity affects the performance, i.e., the performances improved as the number of UE increases. The effective performance rates potentially fortify the securities of 5G Network.