Paper Info
Title
The diverse and variegated reactions of different cellular devices to IMSI catching attacks
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to assess how different User Terminals react to IMSI-catching attacks, namely location privacy attacks aiming at gathering the user's International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI). After having implemented two different attack techniques over two different Software-Defined-Radio (SDR) platforms (OpenAirInterface and srsLTE), we have tested these attacks over different versions of the mobile phone brands, for a total of 19 different radio modems tested. We show that while the majority of devices surrender almost immediately, iPhones seem to implement some cleverness that resembles proper countermeasures. We also bring about evidence that the two chosen SDR platforms implement different signaling procedures that differentiate their ability as IMSI-catchers. We finally analyse IMSI-catchers' behaviors against subscribers of different operators, showing that successfulness of the attack depends only on the chipset and the SDR tool. We believe that our analysis may be useful either to practitioners that need to experiment with mobile security, as well as engineers for improving the design of mobile modems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3411276.3412191
MobiCom '20: The 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking London United Kingdom September, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-8082-9
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ivan Palamà121.77
Francesco Gringoli289061.65
Giuseppe Bianchi3429.89
Nicola Blefari-melazzi425138.89