rosemolr
Journeyman
There's something uniquely scary about the idea of your calls being jammed. Good news! It turns out blocking calls and texts to certain phones is pretty easy. Hackers have figured out how to turn a feature phone into a "jammer" with just a few software modifications.
The hack was developed by a security research group at the Technical University of Berlin, who shared their findings in a recent paper at the Usenix Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., last week. Basically, with the help of custom firmware, one feature phone can block calls and texts around it for about 75 square miles by stealing the communications and spiking them into the ground.
When an SMS or call goes out over 2G GSM, the tower starts the exchange by pinging the receiving phone. Once the receiving phone answers back, then the SMS or call goes through. These jammers work by answering the tower's ping before the right phone can. It's not technically "jamming" but the effect is the same. The researchers didn't design the hack to actually read the stolen communications, but there's no reason they couldn't.
Source : Software Update to $20 Phones Could Topple 2G Cell Networks | MIT Technology Review
There is no such thing called perfectly secure!!!
On a personal view: If ever 3gpp is planning to provide a fix for the identified security flaw this would need a fix in protocol.It is not that easy to deploy a fix across the globe.They should have seen this coming.
The hack was developed by a security research group at the Technical University of Berlin, who shared their findings in a recent paper at the Usenix Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., last week. Basically, with the help of custom firmware, one feature phone can block calls and texts around it for about 75 square miles by stealing the communications and spiking them into the ground.
When an SMS or call goes out over 2G GSM, the tower starts the exchange by pinging the receiving phone. Once the receiving phone answers back, then the SMS or call goes through. These jammers work by answering the tower's ping before the right phone can. It's not technically "jamming" but the effect is the same. The researchers didn't design the hack to actually read the stolen communications, but there's no reason they couldn't.
Source : Software Update to $20 Phones Could Topple 2G Cell Networks | MIT Technology Review
There is no such thing called perfectly secure!!!
On a personal view: If ever 3gpp is planning to provide a fix for the identified security flaw this would need a fix in protocol.It is not that easy to deploy a fix across the globe.They should have seen this coming.
