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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.
An authentication device that can be bypassed is a contradiction in terms.
You don't need to see his identification.
changing IP address ranges, guessing passwords
Better passwords would have made all the difference in the world. 16 character, mixed case and symbol types would have been enough of a roadblock to prevent them from gaining access. Too many companies are still shipping products that have no intended user access to the command shell with passwords like "Admin", "12345", and the ever-popular "password". It's not like it costs more to have a longer, more complex password.
(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.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you're encrypting stuff with X's public key, then only whoever has X's private key can decrypt it. So, in essence, you're certain you're talking to X and not someone pretending to be X.
So, by displaying the hash of the public key of the device you're talking to, you're effectively showing the true identity of who you're talking to.
I think the OP's idea is that you can use this information to be sure you're connecting to your own femtocell (on which you have fixed the vulnerability) and not you neighbor's (possibly hacked) femtocell.
I had no idea linux proponents were all Jedi. That explains everything.
"You don't NEED the extra features in Photoshop."
"You don't NEED integrated audio processing software."
"You don't NEED anything OpenOffice doesn't have."
"You don't NEED..."
Now those Jedi need to start using their powers for good.
"You NEED to write documentation for non-technical users..."
I've been working on hacking the Vodafone femtocells for fun. They have an internal serial port and the bootloader has no security, not to mention the Linux image uses short default passwords that are easy to crack given the shadow file. So far we don't know of a way to get root given only network control, but it might be possible depending on how their IPSEC tunnel is set up. Our goal would be to use these for our own network, via OpenBSC.
It's worth noting that it's early and we're not entirely sure about the security implications and just how much you can do with these things (e.g. I don't know yet if voice traffic is decrypted inside the femtocell or if it is passed on encrypted to the servers). Chances are there will be some interesting exploits and chances are they will be presented at this year's Chaos Community Congress if they're interesting enough. Unless we get bored and work on something else, which happens sometimes.