Cell-site simulators (CSS)—also known as IMSI Catchers and Stingrays—are a tool that law enforcement and governments use to track the location of phones, intercept or disrupt communications, spy on foreign governments, or even install malware. Cell-site simulators are also used by criminals to send...
  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    719·
    1 year ago

    Never going to be enough, use a VPN, and only use end to end encryption for calls…

    Or use a VOIP service like google voice for the calls, at least force your monitors to get a warrant to google, make them do some leg work

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        95·
        1 year ago

        I’m confused. How would this not defeat a stingray? They would know your phone is there. But they wouldn’t see who you’re talking to, they wouldn’t hear your phone call, they wouldn’t see your encrypted messages. They wouldn’t see the traffic on your phone. What’s left?

        • 4am@lemm.eeEnglish
          10·
          1 year ago

          Your IMEI, your carrier IP, your packet timing, any DNS your phone leaks, the IP of your VPN endpoint, your transmitter chipset, your likely OS kernel, any unreleased zero-days known to them (and maybe an exploit for them), and also a way to ack TCP packets it never intends to forward in order to sever your connection while letting your device keep taking for as long as possible, which might buy them a little extra time before you realize they’ve captured your session and cut you off.

          • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
            7·
            1 year ago

            Everything you said is true, but that is a reduced surface area versus the scenario where you’re sending your traffic naked over the wire. Including your voice traffic. Using a VPN while attached to a stingray is strictly a smaller risk surface.

    • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      1 year ago

      Even that isn’t enough. The wireless modules of normal phones have direct access to system memory and, by law, have proprietary firmware. Some exploits have been found over the years. This needs to be isolated to avoid backdoors/bugs.

        • elderflower@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Example: https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation

          Yes, the baseband is isolated on all of the officially supported devices. Memory access is partitioned by the IOMMU and limited to internal memory and memory shared by the driver implementations…Earlier generation devices we used to support prior to Pixels had Wi-Fi + Bluetooth implemented on a separate SoC. This was not properly contained by the stock OS and we put substantial work into addressing that problem.

          Baseband modems were not isolated from kernel memory in stock Android, GrapheneOS had to do it themselves using the IOMMU. We do not know for sure due to the proprietary/closed-source nature of baseband modem drivers, but we have no reason to assume any OEM (Samsung, Xiaomi etc) implemented proper isolation of baseband modem and system memory.