Hello,

Well, MITM is pretty clear explained in the publicly available paper:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.8150&rep=rep1&ty
pe=pdf
(http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-get.cgi/2006/CS/CS-2006-
07.pdf )

Page 23 of the PDF gives clear view of the mode and equipment.

Perhaps, from the picture on page 23, fake phone and fake bts are almost
anything these days - from dedicated highly programmable hardware to general
purpose SDR oriented on GSM.

Also, to answer "It's not clear to me why you would need to mount a man in
the middle attack if you can break A5/1 encryption"

Since there are basically active, semi-active and passive (a totally random
example:
http://www.wi-ltd.com/defence/Covert_Surveillance/Intelligence_Gathering/GSM
_Interception/GSM_PassiveActive_Hybrid_Interception_System ), there can be
good reasons to have MITM for active types of systems.

Thus, at this stage reflextor's A51 + airprobe is aiming towards a passive
type of a system (record, crypto-crack, decrypt), unless openbts + openbsc
join "right in the middle" of the party, metaphorically speaking

HTH,
A

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:a51-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Dino Pastos
> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 4:40 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [A51] GSM A5.1 Realtime Cell Phone Interceptor
> 
> good assumption, very logical and smart at the same time.
> 
> Is it possible that they do something like this?
> 
> (operator cell) -> encrypted channel to (rouge Cell) -> unencrypted
> (target cell phone)
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/12/2010 4:33 PM, sascha wrote:
> > It's not clear to me why you would need to mount a man in the middle
> > attack if you can break A5/1 encryption. While the processing power
> > and table storage could be hidden in the white boxes, both are not
> > mentioned. I would say that the device does not break A5/1
> cryptographically,
> > but works like an IMSI catcher.
> > It could be an IMSI catcher that does not disable
> authentication+encryption
> > on the Um interface between target and catcher.
> > So it does break A5/1.
> > Maybe they disable frequency hopping in their rouge cell, so that
> they
> > can get away without recording the whole band, and when the target
> mobile
> > station get the encrypted channel assignment from the legit BTS it is
> > just ignored. Or the hopping sequences in the rouge cell are
> configured
> > in such a way that no matter what sequence is assigned to the target
> MS,
> > it stays inside the 4 channels of the fake BTS.
> >
> > On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 07:31:59AM -0300, H2G-Labs Information
> Security wrote:
> >
> >> GSM A5.1 Realtime Cell Phone Interceptor
> >> URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eJ-WGpNQko
> >> Anybody got extra informations about it?
> >> Regards...
> >>
> >> --
> >> H2G-Labs Information Security
> >> Igor Marcel - Information Security Consultant
> >> H2GLabs.Information.Security "at" Gmail.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> A51 mailing list
> >> [email protected]
> >> http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
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