which is a new academic paper on catching IMSI catchers. Their Table 1 (on page 5 of the paper) lists 12 possible ways of detecting IMSI catchers.
I suspect there are still others, but that list is pretty thorough! I would add "implausible service area overlap" (the basic case being seeing a tower of carrier A and a tower of carrier B simultaneously, when carrier A and B serve different countries that don't have territory within 50 km of one another). For example, there was a report that a Uganda Telecom tower was seen near the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Julian Assange is staying. Even without a tower-by-tower location database, you could conclude that Ugandan and UK base station signals shouldn't be observed at the same location.
https://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publications...
which is a new academic paper on catching IMSI catchers. Their Table 1 (on page 5 of the paper) lists 12 possible ways of detecting IMSI catchers.
I suspect there are still others, but that list is pretty thorough! I would add "implausible service area overlap" (the basic case being seeing a tower of carrier A and a tower of carrier B simultaneously, when carrier A and B serve different countries that don't have territory within 50 km of one another). For example, there was a report that a Uganda Telecom tower was seen near the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Julian Assange is staying. Even without a tower-by-tower location database, you could conclude that Ugandan and UK base station signals shouldn't be observed at the same location.