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LIFX is a smart light bulb that can be controlled with your smart phone via your home’s Wi-Fi network. Turns out that anyone within range can obtain the Wi-Fi password from the light bulb. It’s a problem with the communications protocol.
First review of the secure Blackphone.
Hacking Team is an Italian malware company that sells exploit tools to governments. Both Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab have published detailed reports on its capabilities against Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry smart phones.
They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion.
[…]
Once on a system, the iPhone module uses advance techniques to avoid draining the phone’s battery, turning on the phone’s microphone, for example, only under certain conditions.
“They can just turn on the mic and record everything going on around the victim, but the battery life is limited, and the victim can notice something is wrong with the iPhone, so they use special triggers,” says Costin Raiu, head of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis team.
One of those triggers might be when the victim’s phone connects to a specific WiFi network, such as a work network, signaling the owner is in an important environment. “I can’t remember having seen such advanced techniques in other mobile malware,” he says.
Hacking Team’s mobile tools also have a “crisis” module that kicks in when they sense the presence of certain detection activities occurring on a device, such as packet sniffing, and then pause the spyware’s activity to avoid detection. There is also a “wipe” function to erase the tool from infected systems.
Hacking Team claims to sell its tools only to ethical governments, but Citizen Lab has found evidence of their use in Saudi Arabia. It can’t be certain the Saudi government is a customer, but there’s good circumstantial evidence. In general, circumstantial evidence is all we have. Citizen Lab has found Hacking Team servers in many countries, but it’s a perfectly reasonable strategy for Country A to locate its servers in Country B.
And remember, this is just one example of government spyware. Assume that the NSA—as well as the governments of China, Russia, and a handful of other countries—have their own systems that are at least as powerful.
MarketWatch has a list of five apps for spying on your spouse.
Here’s a way to plant false evidence—call records, locations, etc—on your smart phone. I have no idea how good this will be. Presumably it will be an arms race between programs like this and programs that harvest data from your phone.
New paper: “Your Secret Stingray’s No Secret Anymore: The Vanishing Government Monopoly Over Cell Phone Surveillance and its Impact on National Security and Consumer Privacy,” by Christopher Soghoian and Stephanie K. Pell:
Abstract: In the early 1990s, off-the-shelf radio scanners allowed any snoop or criminal to eavesdrop on the calls of nearby cell phone users. These radio scanners could intercept calls due to a significant security vulnerability inherent in then widely used analog cellular phone networks: calls were not encrypted as they traveled over the air. In response to this problem, Congress, rather than exploring options for improving the security of cellular networks, merely outlawed the sale of new radio scanners capable of intercepting cellular signals, which did nothing to prevent the potential use of millions of existing interception-capable radio scanners. Now, nearly two decades after Congress passed legislation intended to protect analog phones from interception by radio scanners, we are rapidly approaching a future with a widespread interception threat to cellular communications very reminiscent of the one scanner posed in the 1990s, but with a much larger range of public and private actors with access to a much more powerful cellular interception technology that exploits security vulnerabilities in our digital cellular networks.
This Article illustrates how cellular interception capabilities and technology have become, for better or worse, globalized and democratized, placing Americans’ cellular communications at risk of interception from foreign governments, criminals, the tabloid press and virtually anyone else with sufficient motive to capture cellular content in transmission. Notwithstanding this risk, US government agencies continue to treat practically everything about this cellular interception technology, as a closely guarded, necessarily secret “source and method,” shrouding the technical capabilities and limitations of the equipment from public discussion, even keeping its very name from public disclosure. This “source and method” argument, although questionable in its efficacy, is invoked to protect law enforcement agencies’ own use of this technology while allegedly preventing criminal suspects from learning how to evade surveillance.
This Article argues that current policy makers should not follow the worn path of attempting to outlaw technology while ignoring, and thus perpetuating, the significant vulnerabilities in cellular communications networks on which it depends. Moreover, lawmakers must resist the reflexive temptation to elevate the sustainability of a particular surveillance technology over the need to curtail the general threat that technology poses to the security of cellular networks. Instead, with regard to this destabilizing, unmediated technology and its increasing general availability at decreasing prices, Congress and appropriate regulators should address these network vulnerabilities directly and thoroughly as part of the larger cyber security policy debates and solutions now under consideration. This Article concludes by offering the beginnings of a way forward for legislators to address digital cellular network vulnerabilities with a new sense of urgency appropriate to the current communications security environment.
It’s been long known that individual analog devices have their own fingerprints. Decades ago, individual radio transmitters were identifiable and trackable. Now, researchers have found that accelerometers in smartphone are unique enough to be identifiable.
The researchers focused specifically on the accelerometer, a sensor that tracks three-dimensional movements of the phone essential for countless applications, including pedometers, sleep monitoring, mobile gaming but their findings suggest that other sensors could leave equally unique fingerprints.
“When you manufacture the hardware, the factory cannot produce the identical thing in millions,” Roy said. “So these imperfections create fingerprints.”
Of course, these fingerprints are only visible when accelerometer data signals are analyzed in detail. Most applications do not require this level of analysis, yet the data shared with all applications—your favorite game, your pedometer—bear the mark. Should someone want to perform this analysis, they could do so.
The researchers tested more than 100 devices over the course of nine months: 80 standalone accelerometer chips used in popular smartphones, 25 Android phones and two tablets.
The accelerometers in all permutations were selected from different manufacturers, to ensure that the fingerprints weren’t simply defects resulting from a particular production line.
With 96-percent accuracy, the researchers could discriminate one sensor from another.
Interesting research:
Abstract: The HLR/AuC is considered to be one of the most important network elements of a 3G network. It can serve up to five million subscribers and at least one transaction with HLR/AuC is required for every single phone call or data session. This paper presents experimental results and observations that can be exploited to perform a novel distributed denial of service attack in 3G networks that targets the availability of the HLR/AuC. More specifically, first we present an experiment in which we identified and proved some zero-day vulnerabilities of the 3G network that can be exploited by malicious actors to mount various attacks. For the purpose of our experiment, we have used off-the-shelf infrastructure and software, without any specialized modification. Based on the observations of the experiment, we reveal an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) in 3G networks that aims to flood an HLR/AuC of a mobile operator. We also prove that the discovered APT can be performed in a trivial manner using commodity hardware and software, which is widely and affordably available.
The attack involves cloning SIM cards, then making multiple calls from different handsets in different locations with the same SIM card. This confuses the network into thinking that the same phone is in multiple places at once.
Note that this has not been tested in the field, but there seems no reason why it wouldn’t work.
There’s a lot of insecurity in the fact that cell phones and towers largely trust each other. The NSA and FBI use that fact for eavesdropping, and here it’s used for a denial-of-service attack.
Today’s item from the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:
CANDYGRAM
(S//SI//REL) Mimics GSM cell tower of a target network. Capable of operations at 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz. Whenever a target handset enters the CANDYGRAM base station’s area of influence, the system sends out an SMS through the external network to registered watch phones.
(S//SI//REL) Typical use scenarios are asset validation, target tracking and identification as well as identifying hostile surveillance units with GSM handsets. Functionality is predicated on apriori target information.
(S//SI//REL) System HW
- GPS processing unit
- Tri-band BTS radio
- Windows XP laptop and cell phone*
- 9″ wide x 12″ long x 2″ deep
- External power (9-30 VDC).
*Remote control software can be used with any connected to the laptop (used for communicating with the CANDYGRAM unit through text messages (SMS).
(S//SI//REL) SW Features
- Configurable 200 phone number target deck.
- Network auto-configuration
- Area Survey Capability
- Remote Operation Capability
- Configurable Network emulation
- Configurable RF power level
- Multi-Units under single C&C
- Remote restart
- Remote erasure (not field recoverable)
Status: Available 8 mos ARO
Unit Cost: approx $40K
Page, with graphics, is here. General information about TAO and the catalog is here.
In the comments, feel free to discuss how the exploit works, how we might detect it, how it has probably been improved since the catalog entry in 2008, and so on.
Today’s item from the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:
MONKEYCALENDAR
(TS//SI//REL) MONKEYCALENDAR is a software implant for GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. This implant pulls geolocation information from a target handset and exfiltrates it to a user-defined phone number via short message service (SMS).
(TS//SI//REL) Modern SIM cards (Phase 2+) have an application program interface known as the SIM Toolkit (STK). The STK has a suite of proactive commands that allow the SIM card to issue commands and make requests to the handset. MONKEYCALENDAR uses STK commands to retrieve location information and to exfiltrate data via SMS. After the MONKEYCALENDAR file is compiled, the program is loaded onto the SIM card using either a Universal Serial Bus (USB) smartcard reader or via over-the-air provisioning. In both cases, keys to the card may be required to install the application depending on the service provider’s security configuration.
Unit Cost: $0
Status: Released, not deployed.
Page, with graphics, is here. General information about TAO and the catalog is here.
In the comments, feel free to discuss how the exploit works, how we might detect it, how it has probably been improved since the catalog entry in 2008, and so on.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
