A 5G shortcut leaves phones exposed to Stingray custody

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North American and in many other parts of the world, at high speed 5G mobile data networks when it was not available years. But as 5G coverage becomes ubiquitous, it comes with an important caveat. Even if your phone is connected to the next generation wireless standard, you may not get all the features that 5G promises — including defense against so-called stingray surveillance devices.
To get to 5G masses quickly, most carriers around the world expanded into something called “non-autonomous mode” or “non-autonomous architecture”. The approach basically uses the 4G network infrastructure as a selling point before building the 5G data speed before building the “autonomous” 5G core. It’s like starting a cake decorating business from your cousin’s ice cream shop while you renovate a new storefront that is three blocks away.
You’ll see where that goes. If your 5G connection isn’t in stand-alone mode, a lot of what you’re receiving is still 4G, along with security and privacy vulnerabilities. real 5G wants to deal with it.
“It’s a false sense of security,” says Ravishankar Borgaonkar, a researcher at the Norwegian technology analysis company SINTEF Digital. “Many of the 5Gs currently spread around the world don’t have a protection mechanism designed for 5G. You’re getting a high-speed connection, but your level of security is still 4G.
In practice, this means that one of the major privacy advantages that 5G bills — the difficulty of overseeing surveillance — does not yet apply to most people. It is also known as “IMSI catchers” because of the “international subscriber identity” number assigned to each mobile phone. From there, the device uses IMSI numbers or other identifiers to track the device, as well as listen to phone calls. Ordinary rays are a popular choice Enforcement of U.S. law; were the presence seems to be common many protests against the brutality of the police last summer. To avoid this type of tracking, 5G is built to encrypt IMSI numbers.
Borgaonkar and research partner Altaf Shaik, a scientific researcher at TU Berlin, found that the main carriers in Norway and Germany are taking out 5G in a non-autonomous way, which means that these connections are not yet undergoing rigorous. Both were presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last week.
In the United States, T-Mobile is the most remote spreads its autonomous network. The company was the first to start making a massive expansion in August 2020. Verizon and AT&T have needed more time in the transition and are still working on it Switching to high speed 5G generally. Verizon tells WIRED it’s on trackfull marketing5G autonomously by the end of 20G. AT&T says it started “limited SA deployments” late last year, and will expand “when the ecosystem is ready”.
A February examination The mobile network analysis firm OpenSignal found that in early 2021, U.S. mobile users spent about 27% of their time on non-autonomous 5G mode and less than six percent of their time on autonomous connections.
Although the differences between the 5G types are very important, there is no easy way to find out if you are on a standalone network by looking at your phone. Android users can download apps that scan a device’s network connection and mark a non-standalone mode, but that’s a tedious extra step. These tools are less common in iOS due to restrictions on Apple’s apps.
The lost security benefits in a 5G non-autonomous network extend beyond the rough. You may be able to follow up, listen, and be “so-called”.drop attacks”Target devices that drive older and weaker data networks like 3G. And nothing is communicated to mobile data users, despite the fact that improved security features are the key to selling 5G.
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