Stingray (No, not the car.) | Ars Technica

[Michael O'Dell]

I find all this more than slightly amusing. 
Much of what’s been reported is available by eavesdropping on the
control channels. That would get all the identifying information for all
the handsets in range without doing anything active. Add a hand-held
directional antenna (lotsa gain in a small stick at these frequencies) 
and you’re fox-hunting.

The primary reason a device would emit “covert” signals
is to re-home the handsets to the box. I would expect it to do that with a “forced handoff”
so the handsets re-home with a QSY to a different channel so the box could
do a man-in-the-middle and retransmit on the original channel so the sessions
wouldn’t drop. then the box could use the standard control functions to interrogate
a great many things in the phone, not least of which is its location (probably GPS-based).

On a completely different, utterly unrelated topic….

For quite some time now, a completely open-source SDR cellular base station design
has been readily available. It uses GNU-Radio and the original hardware platform
was the TAPR HSDR(sp??). I believe a much more compact and tidy hardware design
is available now, esp. since the semiconductor biz has been busily making this easier
and easier to do by responding to the cellular system companies and making better
chips with more and more of the parts in tiny little boxes.

The software with all the protocols and control sit atop GNU-Radio and it all works.
For several years now, BURNING MAN has had site-local cellular service provided
by this system. The first few years you could only talk to other handsets at the site
because there was no backhaul out to the PSTN. Lately, however, they’ve gotten
backhaul from one of the Hoop-n-Holler FonKoz. (I believe it was a radio shot -
probably point-to-point WiF.)


AS for how these two stories might be related somehow, I have *no* earthly idea.

Far be it from me to suggest people are straining at gnats and passing elephants.
Or that what they don’t know would amuse and/or scare them mightily.

	-mo




On Mar 5, 2015, at 1:16 PM, Richard Barth <w3hwn at comcast.net> wrote:

> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the-machines-that-steal-your-phones-data/

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