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A comment on Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network?.

Re:Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network? by iSloth on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @02:04PM (#28542319)
As someone who’s spent a lot of time working in the world of telco, it’s depressing how inherently unsecure the networks are in their design – Some networks attempt to improve on this which is good, however I simply wouldn’t call them secure.

My suggestion to anyone seriously worried about security – Consider the Internet access on your device no more secure than open WiFi at a coffee shop, and assume Calls/SMS are no more secure than a public conversation.

In short, use data/internet based over the top applications with encryption that you trust, obviously also trusting your endpoint/device too.

However remember that even that does nothing if your worried of location/device tracking.

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Re:Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network? by kews on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @04:39PM (#28544084)
Does it make any difference worth caring about going from 2G to 3G to 4G? I know extremely little about telecom, and only remember reading once that something oldish with a name like s7 (but that's apparently not it) was so bad.
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Re:Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network? by toast0 on Friday September 17, 2021 @10:49PM (#28573176)
You're thinking of SS7, which is how international voice carriers interconnect (can also do SMS). SS7 was architected around a limited number of trusted participants (national monopoly carriers), but now there are a huge number of participants but there's no structural protection against abuse (although some carriers are able to address some abuses through ad-hoc means)

4G (LTE) at least has mutual authentication between the carrier and the user, so that's a meaningful security improvement.

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Re:Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network? by giantg2 on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @02:30PM (#28542588)
Thanks! I agree with this. I was mostly wondering is any carrier had consumer privacy and stuff in mind from a nontechnical perspective, like not selling user data.
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