[CSS-research] 5G security paper

yomna n yomnanasser at gmail.com
Fri Sep 14 09:56:43 PDT 2018


I'm not finished reading this paper, but there's a subtle observation in it
about passive IMSI-catching attacks I found interesting/haven't seen
mentioned elsewhere: "However, the passive approach is slow since an
attacker has to wait for a mobile device to transmit its IMSI
spontaneously, which is an uncommon event in most locations *(exceptions
are, e.g., airports)*" ... because as soon as people's planes land they
turn on their phones. Since so many foreign mobile phone users pass through
them, airports must have an interesting variety of cell network traffic!
(Also, makes me vaguely curious what the presence of IMSI-catchers around
the Vegas airport is like the week of Blackhat/Defcon/etc.)

I really hope the authors submit to RWC (maybe I should email them and
suggest this). There was only one talk related to IMSI-catching last year,
and it was on how you can setup an IMSI-catcher without needing to write
any actual code.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 9:51 AM Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joe at cdt.org> wrote:

> I'd be interested in that too... I'm curious if the IMSI-catcher
> resistance will actually survive practicality and deployment.
>
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 9:53 PM yomna n <yomnanasser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know if there's a publicly accessible talk that accompanies
>> this paper anywhere? I've done quite a bit of googling and haven't been
>> able to find anything.
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 8:04 PM Cooper Quintin <cooperq at eff.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hah nevemind, Seamus sent it months ago, which is probably why I had the
>>> tab open. Carry on! :)
>>>
>>> Cooper Quintin
>>> Senior Staff Technologist | EFF
>>> PGP: 75FB 9347 FA4B 22A0 5068 080B D0EA 7B6F F0AF E2CA
>>> Twitter: @cooperq
>>>
>>> On 09/13/2018 05:03 PM, Cooper Quintin wrote:
>>> > I can't remember if it already got sent to the list or not, but this 5G
>>> > security proposal from erricson was pretty interesting.
>>> > https://www.ericsson.com/research-blog/protecting-5g-imsi-catchers/
>>> >
>>> > I was going to write to the guys who wrote it and see if any of their
>>> > proposals made it into the final spec.
>>> >
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>
>
> --
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> Chief Technologist, Center for Democracy & Technology [https://www.cdt.org
> ]
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