Toward Large-Scale Rogue Base Station Attacks Using Container-Based Virtualization

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is governing mobile communication technology in recent years, and its security issue always receives lots of attention. Due to the popularity of software defined radio (SDR), low-cost development hardware, and open source LTE project, rouge Base Station (BS) attack can be achieved with much lower price in recent years. However, the current rouge BS attack suffers from limited by the non-commercial antennas, which results in a very small attack range. In this paper, we encapsulate the functions of LTE into different Docker containers located in different physical network entities following the concept of network function virtualization (NFV). By networking those Docker containers using the recent innovation, overlay network, a cooperative and large-scale rouge BS attack can be achieved. Under the coordination of the proposed controller, multiple victims supported by multiple telecommunication operators (and the multiple spectra), using multiple types of equipment (and thus the chipset), or located in multiple locations are targeted in a simultaneous fashion. We verify the feasibility of the proposed attack using the proposed experimental platform.