1806, 2015

Surveillance Article: Listening Posts for Wireless Communication

René Pfeiffer/ June 18, 2015/ High Entropy

Modern ways of communication and methods to obtain the transported data have raised eyebrows and interest in the past years. Information security specialists are used to digitally dig into the networked world. Once you take a look at buildings, geographic topology, and photographs of structures your world view expands. Coupled with the knowledge of ham radio operators connecting the dots can give you some new information about structures hiding in plain sight. This is why we have translated an article by Erich Moechel, Austrian journalist who is writing blog articles for the FM4 radio station. Read  this article for yourself and keep our Call for Papers for DeepSec 2015 in mind. If you have ideas how to keep an eye on the environment surrounding your information technology infrastructure let us know. Companies should know

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0410, 2013

DeepSec 2013 Workshop: Attacks On GSM Networks

René Pfeiffer/ October 4, 2013/ Conference, Security, Training

Mobile phone networks have penetrated even the most remote areas of the Earth. You can send a tweet from Mount Everest if you like, the cell service is already there. In addition mobile phone networks feature 6 billion subscribers all over the world. Communication by mobile devices has entered the routine of daily life. It’s not all about talking. Smartphone, laptops, tablets and modems access the Internet by mobile phone networks. And as every security specialist knows: If there’s a network, then there are protocols, and these protocols can be attacked. True, it’s not as easy as TCP/IP since mobile phone networks feature sets of more complex protocols. Nevertheless these networks can be accessed, and you cannot block it. This is why you should get in touch with the threats to your organisation. DeepSec

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2009, 2012

DeepSec 2012 Workshop: Attacks on GSM Networks

René Pfeiffer/ September 20, 2012/ Conference

We are proud to follow the tradition of breaking hardware, software, code, ciphers or protocols. When it comes to mobile phone networks, you can break a lot. The workshop on Attacks on GSM Networks will show you the current state of affairs and some new tricks and developments. The attacks that will be discussed during the training are not theoretical, they are feasible and can be exploited to be used against you. Knowing about the capabilities of your adversaries is absolutely important since virtually no organisation or business runs without the use of mobile networks. What do you have to expect? Well, attendees will spend about half the time re-visiting the key aspects of GSM’s security features and their publicly known weaknesses. During the other half, attention is being paid to the hands-on practical

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1610, 2011

Talk: Extending Scapy by a GSM Air Interface

René Pfeiffer/ October 16, 2011/ Conference

Scapy is the „Swiss Army tool“ among security software. Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program. It is used for scanning, probing, testing software implementations, tracing network packets, network discovery, injecting frames, and other tasks. So it’s a security power tool useful for a lot of tasks in security research. Wouldn’t it be nice to add some capabilities on layer 3 of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) protocol? This layer covers the UM interface that connects mobile network clients over the air interface to the base stations. Capturing packets on this link alone would be a great benefit to security researchers. Laurent ‘kabel’ Weber of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum will talk about „Extending Scapy by a GSM Air Interface and Validating the Implementation Using Novel Attacks“ at DeepSec 2011. Laurent’s talk describes the enhancement

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1009, 2011

Workshop: Attacks on GSM Networks

René Pfeiffer/ September 10, 2011/ Conference

The topic of GSM networks has been discussed at past DeepSec conferences right from the very first event in 2007. Recent years saw a significant increase of research in GSM attacks: The weaknesses of A5/1 encryption have been demonstrated and exploited, several GPRS networks in Europe have been shown to be insecure, and an ever-growing number of Open Source projects in the area of GSM and GPRS are gaining significant attraction. Despite the availability of attack methods, the tools are often hard to use for security professionals due to their limited documentation. The published attacks are often difficult to reimplement when assessing the vulnerability of GSM networks. This is exactly why DeepSec 2011 offers a two-day training on attacking GSM networks. Attendees will spend about half the time re-visiting the key aspects of GSM’s

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2005, 2011

Mobile Network Security revisited at the Linuxwochen

René Pfeiffer/ May 20, 2011/ Veranstaltung

Tomorrow we will present a review talk about the state of mobile network security. The talk will be held at the Linuxwochen in Eisenstadt. We will address results discussed in the past DeepSec conferences (including work of Karsten Nohl, Harald Welte, David A. Burgess, Sylvain Munaut, Dieter Spaar, Ralph-Philipp Weinmann and others). If you understand German we recommend listening to Chaosradio Express #179 where Karsten explain to Tim Pritlove the state of GSM security over a period of 130 minutes. Slides of our talk will be available after the Linuxwochen. Update: You can download the slides here. There’s a simple audio recording available as well (MP3 or OGG).

0205, 2011

DeepSec 2011 Focus: Mobile Computing and Communications

René Pfeiffer/ May 2, 2011/ Conference

Our Call for Papers announcement mentioned seven topics that we are focussing on. We’d like to explain what these topics are all about in a couple of blog postings since it is not easy to squeeze everything into a few lines. We begin with mobile computing and communication. Mobile computing incorporates mobile computing devices such as smart phones, tablets, cell phones, laptops, netbooks, wrist watches, navigation devices and similar computers. Most of us are now accustomed to frequently use portable computing. We want to know what bugs and security risks we carry around. A lot of users regard these mobile computers as appliance, therefore the thought of upgrading or fixing software on them is less widespread. You don’t do firmware upgrades on your microwave oven or water boiler, do you? Maybe you should. Mobile

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2011, 2010

DeepSec: Mobile Radio Networks as Targets for Virtual Warfare

René Pfeiffer/ November 20, 2010/ Press

Vienna – The times when a mobile phone was used solely to make calls are long gone, now it’s all about making pictures and surfing the Internet. The groundbreaking success of the iPhone is just one example for the fact that mobile phones have long since outgrown their original use. Youths and adults use them every day  to get information about recent news, the weather or navigation for a future trip with the car. Having the new all-purpose information device by the hand has become a habit. But what happens if criminals or assassins attack the mobile phone network? Cyber War: Public Life in the Crosshairs “The GSM radio network is used by more than 200 countries and holds many spectacular flaws which we want to illustrate.”, explains René Pfeiffer, organiser of the international

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1511, 2010

A Brief History of GSM A5/2 and 2G/3G Security

René Pfeiffer/ November 15, 2010/ Stories

MiKa and me shared some knowledge about the design flaws and the state of security in 2G/3G networks. The idea was to present an overview. Those networks have been shrouded in NDAs for too long. It is good to see that this is changing. Given the fact that millions of people use this technology on a daily basis, there should have been more publications and a deeper analysis many years ago. GSM features four A5 encryption algorithms. They are called A5/0, A5/1, A5/2 and A5/3. A5/0 is basically plaintext, because no encryption is used. A5/1 is the original A5 algorithm used in Europe. A5/2 is a weaker encryption algorithm created for export (the weakness is a design feature). A5/3 is a strong encryption algorithm created as part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project. The

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0208, 2010

Sneak Preview – your cellphone can be tapped

René Pfeiffer/ August 2, 2010/ Schedule, Security

You probably have a cellphone. Your company might even provide an additional one. Your boss most certainly uses a cellphone. What do you use it for? Do you share details about your private life via phone conversations? Did you ever talk to a business partner about confidential offers? Do you rely on cellphone when it comes to important messages? If so you might be interested in hearing some news about the state of security of mobile networks. Most of them are broken, outdated or both when it comes to security. Details of the security issues have been presented at DeepSec 2009 by Karsten Nohl. During Defcon18 in Las Vegas a security researcher successfully faked several attendees’ cell phones into connecting to his phony GSM base station during a live demonstration that had initially raised

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