Jailbreak Turns Cheap Walkie-Talkie Into DMR Police Scanner

An anonymous reader writes: Last Shmoocon, famous reverse engineer Travis Goodspeed presented his jailbreak of the Chinese MD380 digital handheld radio. The hack has since been published at GitHub with all needed source code to turn a cheap digital radio into the first hardware scanner for DMR digital mobile radio: a firmware patch for promiscuous mode that puts all talk groups through the speaker including private calling. In the U.S. the competing APCO-25 is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but a lot of state/county and local public safety organizations including city police dispatch channels are using the Mototrbo MotorolaDMR digital standard.

Comments

Re:Why is Police band unencrypted?

[Coren22]

The funny thing about that ruling you reference is that cell phone communications are encrypted by default. The Stingray devices have to trick the cell phones into connecting to them because passive monitoring doesn't work for capture of the information, they actually have to tell the cell phone to turn off encryption to even work.