Re:How to Build Your Own Rogue GSM BTS for Fun and Profit
by mindslight on Saturday April 02, 2016 @11:50PM
(#11414844)
Ah crap the timing could indeed be a fundamental problem. Proxying a SIM card is just a recent idea I've been kicking around. Alternatively a privacy-friendly VMVNO could just send a new SIM every (week,month,etc). Once the concept was proven (with non-fixed IMEI etc), I'm imagining a commercial demand would spring up in short order. There's no reason a SIM card must be treacherous hardware.
Obviously a small or singular mix group can be worse than no psuedonymity at all, but the idea would be to go for wider adoption. If I actually wanted to privately engage in illegal activity, I'd just buy burner phones and use the appropriate opsec. Really I just want to enable privacy for all of us who don't have something to hide.
Re:How to Build Your Own Rogue GSM BTS for Fun and Profit
by acgh213 on Sunday April 03, 2016 @02:31AM
(#11415175)
I remember being in Ireland last summer and seeing right off the plane a vending machine of burnable sim cards.
The market doesn't exist in the US yet, but Europe seems to be somewhat accustomed to it.
While it doesn't even intend to be "consumer friendly" firmware replacement, the project provides a lot of interesting info on hacking TI Calypso basebands used for instance in some old Motorola devices and Openmoko phones.
Proxied SIM probably won't work due to timing constraints and I don't think it could be possible on device's own connection, but I'm not really an expert in this area, so don't believe me and my educated guesses too much.
However, counter-intuitively, playing with stuff like IMEI number will probably make you even easier target. Some hardware characteristics of your device could be used to "fingerprint" it, and having a lot of IMEIs being advertised by some old Calypso device in similar area could easily bring some attention to it.