LTE/LTE-A Network Security Data Collection and Analysis for Security Measurement: A Survey

The long-term evolution (LTE)/LTE-advanced (LTE-A) network provides advanced services for billions of users with its higher bandwidths, better spectrum efficiency, and lower latency than legacy cellular networks. But it still suffers from new security threats due to its all IP-based heterogeneous architecture. Therefore, there is a critical need to perform a rapid and accurate network security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network. To achieve LTE/LTE-A network security measurement, security-relevant data (in short security data) collection and data analysis for attack detection are required as prerequisites. However, most of the existing work only focuses on data collection and analysis for a certain type of LTE/LTE-A attacks. Little work has been done to comprehensively perform data collection and analysis for detecting various attacks on the LTE/LTE-A network. Different from previous work, in this paper, we review the security data collection and data analysis methods in terms of various attacks in order to provide the basis of security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network. We first present a comprehensive taxonomy of attacks according to the LTE/LTE-A network structure. Then, we propose a number of criteria for evaluating the performance of data collection and analysis methods. And we lay our emphasis on the survey of data collection and analysis methods for significant active attack detection in the LTE/LTE-A network. All the reviewed methods are analyzed and discussed based on the proposed evaluation criteria. Furthermore, current open issues and future research challenges are presented with a view to stimulating future research. Finally, an adaptive data collection and data analysis model for security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network is proposed.