Protecting System Information From False Base Station Attacks: A Blockchain-Based Approach

Ensuring secure access to cellular networks is of paramount importance, in which system information (SI) protection plays a crucial role at the initial access stage. While the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) released many standardizations to enhance SI protection for preventing users from false base station (FBS) attacks, most of them are centralized solutions which are vulnerable to potential attacks and single-point failures. To address the aforementioned issues, a blockchain-enabled SI protection (BeSI), as a compatible and effective secure access scheme, is developed in this work, which aims at guaranteeing the authenticity and reliability of SI by considering the features of blockchain in immutability, traceability, and decentralization. Then, we derive a mathematical framework to justify the superiority of using blockchain in SI protection. Moreover, by resorting to a Poisson point process as the geographical model for both base stations and FBSs, we thus theoretically analyze the security gain of blockchain and understand the impact of network parameters including redundancy rate, number of confirmation blocks, and the density of base stations. Finally, numerical results are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of BeSI.