Study On Pseudo Base-Station Identification Mechanisms For Mobile Communication Security

Pseudo base-station issue is currently a hot topic in the field of mobile communication security. Pseudo base-station takes advantage of the defect of authentication mechanism in GSM communication system and sends spam messages to GSM users, it has been a threat to the user’s personal safety and property security. Current prevention means for pseudo base-station have some limitations and can hardly eradicate this problem. Therefore, exploring effective mechanisms to identify pseudo base-stations is practically significant.In this paper, firstly, the security flaws in GSM communication system were studied. Secondly, the principle of conventional mobile pseudo base-station was put forward based on the analysis of a large number of pseudo base-station case reports. In addition, existing pseudo base-station prevention works were summarized and necessity of working out an effective identify means was stressed. Then the author put forward two pseudo base-station identify mechanisms:one is based on wireless signal perception and the other is based on SMS authentication. The former make use of the feature that the pseudo base-stations have larger transmitted signal strength than normal base-stations, obtaining the signal strength in current location and recording it on the map as a signal strength marker. Through sensing the changes in signal strength or comparing the current signal strength to the normal value, it can determine whether the user is in the coverage of the pseudo base-station. The latter take advantages of different sending route between pseudo base-station SMS and legitimate SMS, implementing the digital signature function in SMSC and verifying the digital signature in mobile terminal to identify the pseudo base-station SMS. When the SMS is determine to be a pseudo base-station SMS, the received time and location is collected and uploaded to the server to help identify the pseudo base-station.In this paper, the author designed the two identify mechanisms in detail, the core functions have been realized on Android platform, the part that cannot be implemented in existing GSM system used simulation to check the effect of identify mechanism. This work provides effective solutions to trace and prevent the pseudo base-stations.