Our goal is to bridge that gap, and with this post we hope to make accessible the technical inner workings of CSSs, or rather, the details of the kind of attacks they might rely on. There is a plethora of low-level academic research in the area of cell network security, and many high-level posts that don’t really explain in any meaningful detail what’s going on with “IMSI-catcher” type cell network attacks.
Of course, it’s hard to acknowledge the prevalence of CSSs when law enforcement goes to great lengths to keep information about them from the public.
The truth is that CSSs are significantly more widespread than most policy makers, researchers, and activists are aware, and their danger to privacy is more significant than most realize. Many activists aren’t aware that CSSs could be in use around them without their knowledge, particularly during protests. It's unclear how much oversight the Department has been exercising, and when it comes to state and local law enforcement, only a few cities have any protections at all. Congress recently asked the Department of Homeland Security for more information about their use by federal law enforcement, as well as state and local partners. In the research community, there has been a tendency to dismiss the prevalence of CSS and the threat they pose to the public. There’s a lot of confusion about what CSSs are actually capable of, and different groups-from activists to policy makers to technologists-understand them differently. These devices let their operators “snoop” on the phone usage of people nearby. You’ve probably heard of Stingrays or IMSI-catchers, which belong to the broader category of “Cell Site Simulators” (CSSs). Section 3.5.1: Protocol downgrade attacksĬonclusion: the past & future of cell network security Section 3.5: Denial of Service and Downgrading Section 3.4.2: Active location tracking and exact GPS coordinates Section 3.3: LTE CSS connection techniques Section 3.2.3: Why aren’t users alerted that encryption is off?
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