Gaining Root Access On Linux-Based Femtocells

viralMeme writes "According to the Register, 'Security researchers have turned their attention to femtocells, and have discovered that gaining root on the tiny mobile base stations isn't as hard as one might hope.' One of the researchers said, 'After hours of sniffing traffic, changing IP address ranges, guessing passwords and investigating hardware pinouts, we had obtained root access on these Linux-based cellular-based devices, which piqued our curiosity [about] the security implications.' Whoever designed these devices should be sent back to computer school. An authentication device that can be bypassed is a contradiction in terms. Or, as some pen-pusher would put it in a report: an unantipicated security excursion.

Comments

I noticed that the Register article...

[idontgno]

(Yes, I read TFAs)

The Reg article kinda brushed off the risks of a cell-tower MITM attack, relegating it to a mere "loss of privacy" because the 3G cryptosystem is strong.

I assume it means that the cryptosystem is too strong for a realtime attack. It's a damn rare cryptosystem that can't be broken using enough stored ciphertext, so if the modified femtocell is storing and forwarding all traffic, traffic analysis + theoretical weaknesses in the algo + massive compute power == recovered clear material at some point in the future. Depending on the use case, there may be a lot of value in that.

A couple of points ...

[PPH]

The summary mentions "investigating hardware pinouts". This makes me think that the attack is, in part, on the hardware. If one has access to hardware, they've pwned the system. Period. So this is a non-issue.

Second; cell phones trusting the base station has always been a security issue. And "exploits" based upon this weakness are already in use by law enforcement as well as criminals. The whole inmates sneaking cell phones into prisons has been made a non-issue based upon this very approach. Prisons are beginning to cover their facilities with femtocells which give them the ability to monitor all illicit cell traffic on their property. Any truly secure system will assume that the network carrying its traffic is insecure.