Cell association attack via reference signal spoofing in multi-cell wireless networks

Abstract

The research in this dissertation involved investigating a novel physical-layer security problem wherein malicious base stations (MBSs) mislead mobile terminals (MTs) into being prematurely handed over to suboptimal target cells, resulting in radio link failure (RLF). The MBSs achieve this by spoofing the common reference signals of legitimate base stations (LBSs), which are used by MTs to measure signal strengths