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Abstract
Fake base stations (FBSes) pose a significant security threat by
impersonating legitimate base stations (BSes). Though efforts have been made to
defeat this threat, up to this day, the presence of FBSes and the multi-step
attacks (MSAs) stemming from them can lead to unauthorized surveillance,
interception of sensitive information, and disruption of network services.
Therefore, detecting these malicious entities is crucial to ensure the security
and reliability of cellular networks. Traditional detection methods often rely
on additional hardware, rules, signal scanning, changing protocol
specifications, or cryptographic mechanisms that have limitations and incur
huge infrastructure costs. In this paper, we develop FBSDetector-an effective
and efficient detection solution that can reliably detect FBSes and MSAs from
layer-3 network traces using machine learning (ML) at the user equipment (UE)
side. To develop FBSDetector, we create FBSAD and MSAD, the first-ever
high-quality and large-scale datasets incorporating instances of FBSes and 21
MSAs. These datasets capture the network traces in different real-world
cellular network scenarios (including mobility and different attacker
capabilities) incorporating legitimate BSes and FBSes. Our novel ML framework,
specifically designed to detect FBSes in a multi-level approach for packet
classification using stateful LSTM with attention and trace level
classification and MSAs using graph learning, can effectively detect FBSes with
an accuracy of 96% and a false positive rate of 2.96%, and recognize MSAs with
an accuracy of 86% and a false positive rate of 3.28%. We deploy FBSDetector as
a real-world solution to protect end-users through a mobile app and validate it
in real-world environments. Compared to the existing heuristic-based solutions
that fail to detect FBSes, FBSDetector can detect FBSes in the wild in
real-time.