An AI-Enabled Framework to Defend Ingenious MDT-Based Attacks on the Emerging Zero Touch Cellular Networks

Deep automation provided by self-organizing network (SON) features and their emerging variants such as zero touch automation solutions is a key enabler for increasingly dense wireless networks and pervasive Internet of Things (IoT). To realize their objectives, most automation functionalities rely on the Minimization of Drive Test (MDT) reports. The MDT reports are used to generate inferences about network state and performance, thus dynamically change network parameters accordingly. However, the collection of MDT reports from commodity user devices, particularly low cost IoT devices, make them a vulnerable entry point to launch an adversarial attack on emerging deeply automated wireless networks. This adds a new dimension to the security threats in the IoT and cellular networks. Existing literature on IoT, SON or zero touch automation does not address this important problem. In this article, we investigate an impactful, first of its kind adversarial attack that can be launched by exploiting the malicious MDT reports from the compromised user equipment (UE). We highlight the detrimental repercussions of this attack on the performance of common network automation functions. We also propose a novel Malicious MDT Reports Identification framework (MRIF) as a countermeasure to detect and eliminate the malicious MDT reports using Machine Learning and verify it through a use case. Thus, the defense mechanism can provide the resilience and robustness for zero touch automation SON engines against the adversarial MDT attack.