Re: Privacy Concerns with UbuntuPhone

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 08:34:24 Thomi Richards wrote:
> Iiiiiinteresting. It sounds like someone with a hackable modem could do
> some interesting things on a cell network then?
> 
> Not that I'd take part in such activities, of course. Seems like an area
> ripe for security research though...

security and crypto is a different thing (I don't know so much about how that 
works for GSM) - cell towers essentially assign frequencies and time slots to 
each handset, they take turns talking to the cell tower on the right 
frequency, if a rogue phone stepped on other people's slots, maybe 
impersonating their 'mac address' equivalent as they go (you could step on 
every slot on a frequency for a few frames then change frequencies and stomp 
on some others) the cell tower would likely start kicking other phones off 
thinking they were behaving badly (their crypto would appear to be wrong.

Please don't do this, it's destructive, cell towers effectively act as traffic 
cops allowing many phones to share the same frequencies, probably more than 
you could with non-centralised systems. 

Having said that if you want to play in this sort of space please lobby 
government for some "white space" legislation allowing open source stacks that 
play well with each other to share unused spectrum - the 'wifi' band is a 
wonderful example of what happens when you release some spectrum and just say 
"play nicely with each other", we need more of it being reserved for the 
public rather than being sold off to the highest bidder - that doesn't 
encourage the sort of experimentation that we all value

	Paul

_______________________________________________
DunLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ethernal.org/listinfo/dunlug
DunLUG Wiki - http://dunlug.kallisti.net.nz/