Abstract: 4.1 billion people around the world depend on GSM for at least a part of their day to day communication. Besides communication, more and more additional services - like payment functionality – are being deployed on top of GSM. It has been over 20 years since GSM was designed, and in that time several security problems have been found, both in the protocols and in the originally secret cryptography. However practical exploits of these weaknesses are complicated because of all the signal processing involved and have not been seen much outside of their use by law enforcement agencies. This could change due to recently developed open-source equipment and software that can capture and digitize signals from the GSM frequencies. This might make practical attacks against GSM much simpler. This paper discusses the current state-of-affairs in vulnerabilities of the GSM air-interface, using open-source signal processing. To this end some currently available open-source hardware and software which can be used for signal capturing and some offshoot projects which specifically target GSM are described. Most importantly these include the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) together with the Gnu Radio implementation for signal capturing and the Air Probe and Open BTS project for handling GSM signals. An in depth view on the functionality of the air-interface of GSM and its security measures are presented and the feasibility of several attacks on the GSM air-interface using the open-source tools is discussed. The monitoring of GSM in real time is restricted only for law enforcement agencies and authorized Government agencies offering them a powerful tool to intercept and track GSM communication.
Title: ACTIVE GSM MONITORING
Author: Prof. Kanaiya Kanzaria, Sanjay S.C
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research
ISSN 2348-120X (online), ISSN 2348-1196 (print)
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