Hot answers tagged phone
38
A few scams I've seen making the rounds:
Use it to dial a premium rate number owned by the group. In the UK, 09xx numbers can cost up to £1.50 per minute, and most 09xx providers charge around 33%, so a five minute call syphons £5 into the group's hands. If you're a good social engineer, you might only have a 10 minute gap between calls as you wander ...
30
GSM includes some protection through cryptography. The mobile phone and the provider (i.e. the base station which is part of the provider's network) authenticate each other relatively to a shared secret, which is known to the provider and stored in the user's SIM card. Some algorithms known under the code names "A3" and "A8" are involved in the ...
18
What are the technical aspects to tracing a phone call; is it more difficult for mobile phone?
In the old days, signaling was inline, hence the 2600hz hack. Calls were setup as one switch talked to another, then another, and so on until a circuit was established end-to-end. In the modern age, everything is out-of-band over SS7 and every switch is lined ...
18
For telecommunications, checkout GSM, CDMA, TDMA, and EDGE. The two competing protocols in the United States are GSM and CDMA. The resources linked below are lacking when it comes to CDMA, but using site:defcon.org and site:blackhat.com in your Google searches will turn up some presentations.
For interception of GSM, I refer you to a white paper on ...
18
A SIM identifies you with your network operator; it is necessary to be able to receive calls and to bill you for calls you make. Without a SIM, a phone is mostly useless as a phone, but it can still make emergency calls (in most countries). Without a SIM, your cell phone will not normally transmit data to local base stations, but if you make an emergency ...
12
Who's to say that the phone is really off? If someone controls the firmware of the device then the off functionality could be replaced with state in which the phone appears to be "off" but is in fact maintaining a line of communication to a remote user.
However firmware cannot stop you from introducing a hardware switch to disconnect the microphone. A ...
12
The SIM card must be plugged into a device for it to be functional in any way. It does not contain a power supply or an antenna. As such, it'd be impossible to track a SIM card on its own.
However, once you plug it into a phone and power it on, the IMEI number of the phone and the SIM's serial number will be transmitted to the nearest cell tower(s).
11
Yes, this is accurate. If your version of the Android OS has known privilege escalation vulnerabilities, there is nothing stopping a rogue application from exploiting a privilege escalation vulnerability and thus escaping the sandbox (i.e., gaining unrestricted access to your phone).
This absence of security upgrades is a shortcoming of the Android ...
10
So I'm probably looking for some kind of a challenge-response mechanism here
I'd guess so. Print up a few pages of text in the following format:
# Challenge Response # Challenge Response
1 monkey character 2 sinew orange
3 bottle helmet 4 glass glove
You'll both have the same list. Whenever you authenticate it doesn't matter ...
9
Well, many people consider Location data to be sensitive, as you'd imagine. The classic example is someone being stalked - they don't want their location out on the Internet anywhere.
I suppose what's special about location is that it usually happens automatically and so it's easy to accidentally leak information.
For example, I'm unlikely to accidentally ...
8
GSM Network is encrypted. But that doesn't make it bullet-proof of course. It can be compromised. However, the attacks Rook (and later in much more detail Thomas Pornin) described are very localized and requires significant effort to accomplish. They are not impossible, but very difficult. It requires breaking the GSM network in proximity of the mobile phone ...
8
The kind of attack you are talking is popularly coined as "Juice Jacking".
Are there any "known bad" or "known safe" smartphones with regard to USB security?
In my knowledge, NO.
How does a corporation protect from these risks?
By making policies (actually spreading awareness) about the threat
as many people yet aren't aware about it.
And ...
7
As a meta-answer, consider the attack types:
Active attacks on the line: the bad guys plug on the line, observe the communication, and interfere with it. When both Alice and Bob have done their games with passwords or whatever, and are both convinced that they talk to the right person, the attackers cut the line and promptly redirect both conversations to ...
7
Cell towers are for the GSM/3G/4G network, which tend to require user authentication -- with the SIM card. No SIM card, no 3G, hence cell towers are irrelevant.
If you "surf the Web" and yet do not have a SIM card, then you are using WiFi (and you use your phone as if it was a laptop computer). WiFi signal can be tracked and pinpointed.
6
According to this New York Times article, there were a couple of methods used.
The first was a simple password guessing attack by trying the operator default PIN, and the second method was a social engineering attack against the mobile phone network operator.
The password guessing attack is simple to mitigate against simply by changing the default PIN, the ...
6
A secure phone line is conceptually possible; this is not really different from, e.g., a secure communication between a Web browser and a HTTPS server (there are technical subtleties about lost packets and whether they should be tolerated, but that is not the issue here). However, the movie-secure phone is not secure, and that's a structural problem.
The ...
6
Yes. The easiest way is to get or force the mobile phone carrier to provide unencrypted access to a mobile switching center. At this point identifying and interperting packets and the data the cary is exactly equivenlent to using a packet sniffing tool like wireshark. Given the limitations of cellphones and smartphones it is easier to identify the ...
6
you're right, wireless communications are all around us. We can detect them, but they are encrypted.
3G security seems to be based around the concepts of secure authentication and encrypted communication.
Here's an interesting article on the subject.
3G Security Architecture
There are five different sets of features that are part of the ...
5
1) For wired phones this is very straightforward - the service provider knows where the call is coming from. It only gets more challenging (like in films) when the connection goes through multiple exchanges (they may need to get the information from the exchange) and especially with exchanges in other countries.
For mobile phones the issue is the same, but ...
5
Yes they can be made secure by encrypting data or through mutual authentication of both parties.
for more information check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_telephone and http://www.helpturk.org/telephone-line-encryption.htm
5
Yes, it is possible. There are pay-numbers for sms and calling and if you happen to call to that number or send sms, you are charged with extra than usual call/sms. Often these numbers are used for charity by phone or call-centers and users are informed about rates of these calls. However, they can be used for malicious intent.
To avoid it:
1) Don't call or ...
5
With software, reverse engineering works (there is even a dedicated StackExchange site for reverse engineering questions). Extracting secrets from compiled binaries has been done and redone and done again since the days of the first "copy-protected" games for personal computers, back in the 1980s. The bottom-line is that you cannot really hide a secret value ...
5
For the most part[1] they are encrypted, but not sufficiently enough to be considered as safe, tap resistant encryption. GSM uses 64-bit A5/1 encryption that is weak, to say the least. $15 phone, 3 minutes all that’s needed to eavesdrop on GSM call article from ArsTechnica covers it pretty well IMO, if you care to read more about it.
However, it also ...
4
Non-professional opinion here (not a security guy, more of a software dev), but I'd say in the right hands: more secure, considering how many phone manufacturers are not issuing critical updates to the Android operating system, and how many phones are just running around with giant exploits in them.
Also the source code is available, you, as far as I know, ...
4
There is an additional piece of protection you can put in place:
On my android phones, I have the default connection type set up to be 'charge only' which prevents access through the USB port until I manually set the charge type to accept a connection. And this can only be done through the on-screen menus.
I think iPhones can do the same but don't have any ...
4
How dare you! How dare you question the most secure mobile platform available to mankind! My attempt at humor there.. now to a serious answer before the mods attack. Blackberry has some whitepapers regarding security here: http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/
I would argue the network is not RIM's strongest asset. Corporate and government adoption ...
4
some valid points... I personally go the custom rom route, you mention having to trust the developer, this is true.... Just like every other open source, community driven project. And for that matter Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. I find it much easy to trust an open project vs closed source anything. These are choices we have to make with all tech ...
4
This article explains a method that does not involve guessing or social engineering the voice mail PIN. Many mobile operators seem to configure voice mail access so that the PIN is not required when the subscriber calls from their mobile phone. In these instances, an attacker simply needs to spoof caller ID (so that the call seems to be originating from ...
4
In addition to Jeff's and Rory's answers, there are some less conventional ways of tracking someone. Not by tracing his phone, but analyzing his call behavior. I worked on a datamining project were this was tested(it was based on MIT's Reality Mining). We would train the system with patterns gathered from statistics which you could get from a cellphone ...
4
While discussions about encryption are interesting, I think the key question is: are the carriers incented to care about security? I fear the answer is "no". What is their incentive to spend money securing their SMS systems? Do they even manage them or is it out-sourced? What guarantees of security do they offer? How much do you trust the people ...
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