SITCH - Inexpensive, Coordinated GSM Anomaly Detection

Presented at DEF CON 24 (2016), Aug. 6, 2016, 2 p.m. (60 minutes)

It's recently become easier and less expensive to create malicious GSM Base Transceiver Station (BTS) devices, capable of intercepting and recording phone and sms traffic. Detection methods haven't evolved to be as fast and easy to implement. Wireless situational awareness has a number of challenges. Categorically, these challenges are usually classified under Time, Money, or a lot of both. Provisioning sensors takes time, and the fast stuff usually isn’t cheap. Iterative improvements compound the problem when you need to get software updates to multiple devices in the field. I’ll present a prototype platform for GSM anomaly detection (called SITCH) which uses cloud-delivered services to elegantly deploy, manage, and coordinate the information from many independent wireless telemetry sensors (IoT FTW). We’ll talk about options and trade-offs when selecting sensor hardware, securing your sensors, using cloud services for orchestrating firmware, and how to collect and make sense of the data you’ve amassed. Source code for the prototype will be released as well. The target audience for this lecture is the hacker/tinkerer type with strong systems and network experience. A very basic understanding of GSM networks is a plus, but not required.


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