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How To Compete With NSA By Hacking a Verizon Network Extender
New submitter Anita Hunt (lissnup) writes "This snooping hack-in-a-backpack could become a hot Summer accessory, since Reuters reported that 'researchers at iSec hacked into a Verizon network extender, which anyone can buy online, and turned it into a cell phone tower (video interview) small enough to fit inside a backpack capable of capturing and intercepting all calls, text messages and data sent by mobile devices within range.'"
They dont work all that great in reality i get maybe a -10 difference on my signal strength vs without it running. This could be a fun little hack to try out, for educational reasons, of course.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"This is ordinary people intercepting... ordinary people". A nice,, bitter subversion of the "power to the people" concept ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why would you need to sync your phone to the station to get it to work, let's just send unencrypted communication all over the place.
In the good old bad old days, all you needed to butt into a phone conversation was a Buttinsky phone (linesman test set). Nowadays, you need a whole backpack full of equipment a laptop computer and heavy batteries and we call this progress?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why would you need to sync your phone to the station to get it to work, let's just send unencrypted communication all over the place.
We should be careful in just encouraging encrypted communication, because the usual interpretations of this provide no security at all, and were rejected back in the ARPAnet days of the 1960s by the security advisers.
The usual interpretation of "encrypted communication", of course, is the frequent suggestion that "the Internet" itself should do encryption. This is especially suggested by people who've figured out that the average user doesn't stand much of a chance of doing it right, with modern comm software.
But having "the Internet" do the encryption actually means that the encryption is done by your comm supplier, i.e. your ISP or phone company. What this means is that your comm supplier is the one who also does the decryption, so they have complete access to everything. The recent stories about the close ties between government security agencies and the comm companies show that this would be no security at all.
What was decided back in the 1960s, and what anyone with a basic understanding of security will agree with, is that the low-level comm stuff shouldn't be burdened with any security measures. They are simply a waste of cpu time, since they make your messages accessible to the people who run the low-level comm stuff. The low-level stuff should therefore be tasked simply with getting the bits across as fast as possible. To qualify as secure, any encryption must be handled by the two end-points in a conversation.
Note that this doesn't mean that the (human) end users need to be the ones doing the encryption. What it means is that the encryption software must be running on the piece of hardware that they're using, not by anything further away in the connection.
Of course, then you have the next problem, of preventing spy software from being installed on the hardware at either end. But that's a different issue.
The primary understanding is that we should insist that "encrypted communication" be done only end-to-end. Anything else inherently makes your info available to whoever owns the hardware that's running the encryption software. (And it makes the whole comm system run slower, since encryption software does use cpu time, and if it's not in the end systems, it's 100% a waste of that cpu time.)
The major use-level issue is whether we can create encryption software that runs in the users' gadgets, and which the users can actually use correctly, and which won't be compromised by builtin backdoors such as keyloggers that were installed by the comm companies.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually, there would be quite a bit of security against non-governmental attackers and those working for foreign governments.
And while it is the governmental ones that scare us for having a potential for abuse, it is those others that have done actual damage to millions of computers and hurt millions of people already — through spamming, identity theft, and spying.
I, for one, would've been glad to be rid of those, even if Uncle Sam's fishing expeditions remain a threat.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...in the FBI party wagon.
Not necessarily. You could just have the initial key exchange built into the initial handshake, e.g. like this:
The SYN packet contains the public key certificate of the client.
The SYN/ACK packet contains the public key certificate of the server, and a hash of the client's certificate signed with the server's private key.
The final ACK packet contains a hash of the certificate the server sent, signed with the client's private key.
At this point, the communicating computers know enough about each other to safely encrypt their data stream without any middle man (including the ISP) being able to read the messages. Also, they know that each other computer has the private key for the public key certificate they've sent. All further data then can be encrypted, only the source/destination IP and port need to be unencrypted (because those are needed to route the packets). Since the encryption would already happen at the protocol level, the only thing which would ever go over the lines unencryted would be IP addresses, port numbers and public key certificates.
Of course at this point you did not establish the identity of the server and/or the client, so to prevent MITM attacks you'd need further means to authenticate the server. But the very basic operation of point-to-point encryption of all traffic of a connection can very well be done at the protocol level.
Crappy consumer devices running an embedded OS easy to hack? You don't say!
These things are a gold mine. They contain all the certificates and authority to act as a "tower" and are as hackable and available as any consumer device
No phone or smartphone is designed around the idea that the cell network can be "hostile" so they trust these things implicitly. Time to build a backpack rouge cell and go wandering around where "interesting" people hang out.
I'm waiting for some phone company to offer end-to-end encryption for a fee (maybe they already have?). Of course I'm sure, since they have full access to your phone, that private key will end up "backed-up" for your convenience to their servers.
neorush
Your email client (e.g. thunderbird) should generate a private/public key, and send the public key out with every email. It should encrypt by default if it has a public key and track the key to warn of changes.
Nothing complicated, slowly as it does its thing, all communications will be end to end encrypted. (and the user can edit the public key and lock it if they have the key from a more reliable way).
Will that stop NSA surveillance? No, they'll try something else, e.g. hack Thunderbird. But then we'll fix that.
Fiber optics, they should be encrypted end to end to prevent a tap being placed on them. Sure it won't help if the end is in USA or UK/AUS/NZ/CAN. But its trivial to do a large private key hash on the data, and trivial to have a man carry a mobile hard disk with a 1TB random hash file to install at either end. Nothing fancy is needed to secure an optic line and it should be done.
Slashdot comments should be encrypted. I criticized the NSA and now my email is tapped, a link I sent as a test was followed by a US server. Slashdot should switch to https by default so that NSA can't simply identify commenters by their comments and spy on them. They would have to then go in and install servers in Slashdot, which some Snowden hero figure would then tell us about.
Is it perfect if we do all these things and more? No. But its better.
Cellphones need encryption, as this hack shows. If you think it makes NSA job harder no problem, conference call them every time you call your kids, and CC them on your emails.
No, that's the neat part: the phone does encrypt communications to the station! Only the station is in your backpack, and has the keys to decrypt them.
The cryptographically correct solution would be to do a key exchange with the other person's phone, not the ground station, but CDMA doesn't do that because reasons.
It would be no security because noone vampire taps a fiber line. If youre going to intercept info, you do it at the ISP level, no matter who you are.
That would depend on the implementation, and on what exactly is routinely encryption-protected — and how. For example, if the DNS was secure from the beginning, a large number of actual high-profile attacks would not have been possible.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How Hackers Tapped Into My Cellphone For Less Than $300
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/15/201490397/How-Hackers-Tapped-Into-My-Verizon-Cellphone-For-250
yeah, the reasons why congress blocked the NTT purchase of 21% of AT&T wireless in the nineties.
monetizing, spying shmucks
> no one vampire taps a fiber line
sure about that?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Nobody vampire taps a fiber line. However, the spooks do tap fiber optic cable.
Are they going to backhaul all the traffic once they set up their backpack base station in Times Square?
Mobile banking is already encrypted at the protocol layer. Someone could intercept your Wi-Fi too and intercept the same useless info.
Anyway, nothing that hasn't already been done with Open BTS.
What's a "noone?"
"So this device is a frontal assault or branded -- network extender from Verizon. And it's clearly very small about the size of a home -- that you get from -- -- And you just plug it into your home Internet connection and an -- And you -- at your windows it'll choir GPS lock and at that point functions as a small cell phone -- we started looking at a traffic that was. Can profit by that we were able to intercept people phone calls text messages picture messages and -- So I'm going to make -- call them. -- -- -- Work."
Quote from the transcript of the video (script) that was the link in the stupid summary.
My best guess is that they took a standard signal booster and hacked that a bit to intercept cell signals. Ho Hum...
GCHQ Tapping UK Fiber-Optic Cables
And piss off a multi billion dollar telco while you're at it. What could possibly go wrong?
now we can catch kevin mitnik!
And while it is the governmental ones that scare us for having a potential for abuse, it is those others that have done actual damage to millions of computers and hurt millions of people already — through spamming, identity theft, and spying.
How the hell is encryption going to help with spamming or identity theft?
By making it harder to take over laypeople's Internet-connected computers — to use them as spam-relayes and to steal electronic documents from them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What this means is that your comm supplier is the one who also does the decryption, so they have complete access to everything.
I'm not sure, the "scenario" is sufficiently well-defined in this conversation to make too many conclusions. I was simply responding to an assertion, that, due to an ISP-government collusion, there is no point in ISP-based security. My response was, that there are many other dangers on the Internet — besides government's snooping. And that while government's is a potential threat, certain other threats have already caused millions (billions?) of dollars worth of damage.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not sure, the "scenario" is sufficiently well-defined in this conversation to make too many conclusions. I was simply responding to an assertion, that, due to an ISP-government collusion, there is no point in ISP-based security.
That is enough of a scenario to make certain statements about the security provided though. By definition ISP-based encryption only protects traffic on the wire; it cannot protect the computers at the end points.
We can argue about could-should-woulda, but my main point remains — snooping by the American government is hardly the only danger to today's Internet-users and reducing the other threats would've been good, even if this one remained...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How about reliable DNS? That, if it were in place from the beginning, would've prevented an entire family of attacks...
DNS spoofing requires low latency, which effectively requires that the attacker be on the same local network as his target. ISP-level encryption can't protect against that.
We can argue about could-should-woulda, but my main point remains — snooping by the American government is hardly the only danger to today's Internet-users and reducing the other threats would've been good, even if this one remained...
And my point remains that very few threats can be reduced by ISP-level encryption. I'm sure the govt would be campaigning hard for it if it were such a panacea.