Technology IMEI, ICCID & MIN spoofing

[Fertile]

In the 90s Sprint produced mobile phones that did not contain a SIM. the functions of a SIM were emulated in software. Given the CPU in a SIMs seems to be an ARM CPU (originally an ARM7 (ARMv3) and more recently ARM SecurCore (ARMv7) running at 8-20MHz, it's reasonable for a modern smartphone to emulate the SIM (and prevent microjava applets from being remotely downloaded to it).

I ASSUME that sine people can change the IMEI with a cable & PC software, generating a unique IMEI number every call would not be an issue.

But ICCID is more interesting. It tells the exchange what account a given phone is connected to. If one had a list of say 10,000 subscriptions and each time it randomly picks one, it would be very hard to trace.

It would require a lot of hacking, programming, planning and infrastructure BUT I am not convinced by Telegram or indeed ANY of the supposedly 'secure' mobile phones.

It goes without saying that a post-quantum (quantum resistant) key exchange would be used along with various tricks used by Tails such as restarting the device empty - all previous sessions destroyed.

It's not that I'm up to no good but I KNOW that dodgy MicroJava applets have found their way into SIMs. SecurCore does help a bit although I note that it has a significant weakness AND due to how memory allocation works, it's possible to place a small block of asembly language code ATRER the MicroJava applet and that it's easy for a MicroApplet to drop back into native assembly language. Put simply - one can place malware onto a SIM.

 

[Joey]

You can buy blank Sims and use a combination of hardware and software to flash them however you like. Read your current sim and copy it over.

I'm not sure what might be in place to prevent the reading of these blanks as I've never tried this or gotten too deep into the subject - but I'm pretty sure phone cloning is pretty much child's play compared to some hacks out there.

What I'm interested in is the creation of workable esims on a chromebook.

 

[Jabberwocky]

It goes without saying that a post-quantum (quantum resistant) key exchange would be used along with various tricks used by Tails such as restarting the device empty - all previous sessions destroyed.

i must admit that i didn't understand most of your post cos i don't really know what protocols mobile phones work on. but i'd like to point out that i don't think technology at present (or potentially ever) can support quantum key distribution on mobile phones. you need a source of entanglement that you can control precisely. BB84 can use photon polarisation and so far fibre optics can support it for a few km. so financial centre can use it for secure data transmission, but you can't use it from an arbitrary location.

to obtain entanglement you need two particles generated together, for example two photons emitted when an atom drops an energy level. there is a property called the monogamy of entanglement that means that basically you can only have so much entanglement. every time a particle interacts with another particle, it becomes entangled. but because there is a fixed level of entanglement, it loses entanglement with any other particles it was entangled with to make space for the new one. its a bit like having a conversation, its easy between two people, you can concentrate properly on what the other is saying. if you add another person, you aren't concentrating so much on the first person, cos your attention is now shared. and so on. anyway, this means that when you need maximally entangled particles you need to make sure they don't interact with anything else, temperature (i.e. phonon bath), the atmosphere (gas molecules), literally everything basically, can reduce the entanglement. there may be some super clever ways to maintain it at room temperature, i'm really rusty on this stuff as i haven't studied it since 2013, but if mobile QKD is theoretically possible somehow, i doubt it will be possible practically for a long time.

if we prove P != NP then it will be less of an issue as we'll know that there won't be any algorithms that can easily break our encryption, so we can trust classical algorithms more. currently they are just based on our percerption that certain problems are asymmetrically difficult- i.e. easy one way hard the other- but because lower complexity bounds are fucking hard to prove, we're not sure. but that would reduce the need to depend on quantum protocols. thankfully QKD doesn't depend on BQP != P cos last i checked we weren't even sure of that.

definitely agree that we probably can't trust any of the supposedly secure apps. anything built by humans is prone to error, or malfaisance.

it would certainly be an interesting project and much respect to anyone who makes progress on any of the technical challenges.

 

[Nid Styles]

Yes, it’s possible to have malware on a SIM card.

Mine has malware installed on it right now. It has a phone home protocol installed by some rather crappy people, and they used it to track my location.

There’s an entire library of stuff that’s possible with SIM cards. Including back doors and everything you can imagine. Certain hacking groups use them for sex trafficking and basic tier trash behavior.

Also, cute trap.