Tobias Engel: SS7: Locate. Track. Manipulate.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the foundational demonstration that SS7 is insecure, relevant to arguments about SMS-based two-factor authentication.
What it is
Tobias Engel's 31C3 talk shows how weaknesses in the SS7 telephone signaling network let companies and attackers locate, track and manipulate phones from anywhere in the world, with precision down to about 50 meters.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2017 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Hasknewbie · 2017-07 · on “Telecom Lobbyists Downplayed Security Flaws in Mobile Data Backbone”
SS7 (the protocol whose security flaws are being downplayed here) was not designed with security in mind, and so has been the subject of infosec research for a few years now. This is a CCC talk from 2014 (there are older ones) where Tobias Engel demonstrates among other things tracking down a test subject over two continents for about a month, via his non-tempered mobile phone, using only SS7: [this video] In the same talk he mentions that he is working with a German telecom operator to resolve some of these issues. So as opposed to the US, it appears SS7 has been hardened in the EU since at least 2014 for the type of attacks mentioned in the Vice article... I really wonder why the US MNO are unw
Cites Zekio · 2017-05 · on “Your WiFi is using a stronger encryption than the tech behind 2 factor auth”
If I remember correctly SS7 was proved ridiculously insecure ages ago by a guy who did a talk at DefCon it was quite the interesting talk, will see if I can find it and add it to my comment EDIT: wasn't a defcon talk I remembered, but a 25c3 talk: [LINK] from 2010 :) EDIT2: [this video] newer version of the talk
Cites mindcrime · 2021-06 · on “I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network”
See also, /r/weirdnumbers and, if you're into that sort of thing (that is, exploring the phone network), /r/phreaking Old-skool phreaking[0] (eg, using blue boxes and red boxes) is mostly dead (at least in the US and most "first world" countries. Maybe there is some vestige of in-band signaling left somewhere else) but there is still some fun to be had exploring phones and phone networks. Modern day phreaking is more about GSM sniffing[1], messing with the SS7 network[2][3][4], using SCTP[5]/SIGTRAN stuff[6], etc. etc. But, at least for the land-line / PSTN network, even some of the old "colored boxes"[7] still do useful things. You can always beige-box a landline phone, violet-boxes should