[liberationtech] End-user IMSI detectors

[Cooper Quintin]

I've been doing a lot of work with this over the past few months at EFF.
My current conclusion is that there is nothing that an average user or
activist would be able to reasonably use. However I think that someone
who is reasonably technologically literate and wants to take the time to
learn could use them.

Of the two I think snoopsnitch is better for now, it has the ability to
take pcap files of suspicious traffic and it has a lower level of access
due to it's root status and some unique features of the qualcom chipset
(which it requires).

AIMSICD is interesting in that it has the possibility of being an app
which could be more generally usable, however right now it has way to
many false positives to be usefull by most people.

There is also some interesting work around the concept of building
detectors using raspberry PI / SDR / GSM Modem combo which lets you get
a much lower level of access to the data including being able to see all
available BTSes not just the ones your phone wants to connect to. I've
been playing a lot with SITCH [1] and it seems to be pretty advanced.


1. http://sitch.io/

On 04/06/2017 10:02 AM, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> On 06.04.2017 18:28, Bill Ulrich wrote:
>> I've been playing with an Android App that may be what you're looking for:
>>
>>   https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector
> There's also SnoopSnitch:
> https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/snoopsnitch
> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.srlabs.snoopsnitch
>
> Android solutions are limited in how much they can detect; there's a
> good 2014 paper that discusses and compares various
> IMSI-Catcher-Catchers:
> https://www.sba-research.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/DabrowskiEtAl-IMSI-Catcher-Catcher-ACSAC2014.pdf
>