killab66661
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2022
52:33 · 217K views · Dec 12, 2010
Chris Paget's DEF CON 18 talk on practical cellphone spying, showing how GSM traffic can be intercepted with a fake base station. It covers 2G interception and the weaknesses of cellular networks.
HN points to it as a worrying but technically solid explanation of how cell interception works, even if the talk is old.
4 comments from Hacker News
Worse since they're expensive and pushed by the manufacturer to the point you cannot physically plug a 3.5mm male plug into a female adapter on the newer phones -- you are forced to buy a dongle. Meanwhile the intelligence agencies of the world siphon up signals like hungry hungry hippos because SDRs are cheap and ubiquitious, when ten-ish years ago they were poorly documented, expensive, and the encryption schemes used strong enough using 4g over wifi was a very practical security decision. Here's an old talk that references someone's deadname with good technical information: this video And a more recent talk on similar subjects: [LINK] | [LINK] (Apologies to Kristin, if they see this: I had trouble locating JUST the slides, not audio or video, of the DC18 talk or I would have simply linked the slides.)
I don't have the details in mind but checkout [LINK] Since digital, handsets validate the tower they are talking too, this info is stored on sim or device depending on model. So to intercept 2g, there is some work See this video
And there's a much simpler, regulation-free way to do this anyway: this video So this bill is probably just what it seems - a way to curb cellphone pilferage.
this video I watched this DEFCON talk a while ago. Not sure if it's still relevant, but it is quite worrying.