Public Access 'Blackspots'

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @03:36AM from the look-ma-no-wires dept.

WeakGeek writes "Unstrung has a story talking about a security issue with the combining of 802.11 and GSM/GPRS networks. Seems that 802.11b hotspots provide hackers with an easy way to grab user information from the wide-area network itself. Back when GSM was being defined, standards were designed to only authenticate the details held on the SIM card in a user's device before starting a session on the network. The user's device doesn't in turn check the credentials of the network. Fake a network, get data. Of course, the linked to story seems to be a 'viral' advertisement for a product that fixes this, but I still thought it interesting enough to share."

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Great by Hex4def6 · 2003-02-25 03:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

...However, for public wireless LAN implementations that will connect to backend systems on GSM and GPRS networks, Schlumberger has developed a SIM card-based system (surprise!) that enables mutual authentication between the device and ... ... It's hardly "viral marketing" when you don't promote the product, but just mention that's its one of the solutions to the problem.