Defeating_IMSI_Catchers-CCS_2015

Defeating IMSI CatchersFabian van den BroekInstitute for Computing andInformation SciencesRadboud University Nijmegen,The Netherlands.f.vandenbroekcs.ru.nlRoel VerdultInstitute for Computing andInformation SciencesRadboud University Nijmegen,The Netherlands.rverdultcs.ru.nlJoeri de RuiterSchool of Computer ScienceUniversity of Birmingham,United Kingdomj.deruitercs.bham.ac.ukABSTRACTIMSI catching is a problem on all generations of mobiletelecommunication networks, i.e., 2G (GSM, GPRS), 3G(HDSPA, EDGE, UMTS) and 4G (LTE, LTE+). Currently,the SIM card of a mobile phone has to reveal its identityover an insecure plaintext transmission, before encryptionis enabled. This identifier (the IMSI) can be interceptedby adversaries that mount a passive or active attack. Suchidentity exposure attacks are commonly referred to as IMSIcatching. Since the IMSI is uniquely identifying, unautho-rized exposure can lead to various location privacy attacks.We propose a solution, which essentially replaces the IM-SIs with changing pseudonyms that are only identifiable bythe home network of the SIMs own network provider. Con-sequently, these pseudonyms are unlinkable by intermedi-ate network providers and malicious adversaries, and there-fore mitigate both passive and active attacks, which we alsoformally verified using ProVerif. Our solution is compati-ble with the current specifications of the mobile standardsand therefore requires no change in the infrastructure orany of the already massively deployed network equipment.The proposed method only requires limited changes to theSIM and the authentication server, both of which are un-der control of the users network provider. Therefore, anyindividual (virtual) provider that distributes SIM cards andcontrols its own authentication server can deploy a more pri-vacy friendly mobile network that is resilient against IMSIcatching attacks.Categories and Subject DescriptorsC.2.0 Computer-communication networks: GeneralSecurity and protection; K.4.1 Computers and society:Public Policy IssuePrivacyKeywords3GPP; IMSI catching; privacyPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than theauthor(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, orrepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permissionand/or a fee. Request permissions from P.CCS15, October 1216, 2015, Denver, Colorado, USA.Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.ACM 978-1-4503-3832-5/15/10 .$15.00.DOI: /10.1145/2810103.28136151. INTRODUCTIONIn cellular technologies it is unavoidable that the mobiletelecommunication providers (which we will refer to as sim-ply providers for the rest of this paper) need to know theapproximate location of their users1, in order to be able toroute incoming traffic to the mast currently nearest to theuser. This can lead to serious (location) privacy issues forthe users, as their approximate location is continuously mon-itored. However, if we accept this issue, for instance becausewe trust the providers, then there are still many other pri-vacy issues related to mobile telephony, such as apps shar-ing private data 2 or eavesdropping phone conversations3. One of the first practical privacy attacks against mo-bile phones was the so-called IMSI catching attack, and thisattack persists even in todays mobile network standards.This term refers to the unique identifier present in everySIM2 card, called the IMSI for International Mobile Sub-scriber Identifier. This identifier is transmitted in plain-textover the wireless network as (initial) identification and cantherefore easily be intercepted.IMSI CatchingIMSI catching was one of the first practical attacks on GSM,leading to the development of devices called IMSI catchers,which gather all IMSIs that are active in a geographic area.An IMSI catcher can achieve this in two different ways: pas-sive and active. The passive way is by simply observingthe wireless traffic and storing all IMSIs observed. For themore effective active attack a fake base station is set up,to which cell phones in the neighborhood will attempt toconnect. The fake base station then simply commands eachphone to identify itself. This way IMSIs can be retrievedat any time, while with the passive attack the attacker hasto wait for phones to send out their IMSI. IMSI catchersare commercially available, though they are expensive andusually sold restrictively to government officials. However,in recent years cheap and precise enough equipment has be-come available that can be used to create an (active) IMSIcatcher. Likewise, cheap base stations called femtocells arecommercially available, several of which have been rooted,1Actually, there have been proposals for a TOR-like net-work among mobile phones, in order to obscure the locationof users for the network 1, but such a scheme seems imprac-tical with regard to the reliability we have come to expectfrom the mobile network.2For sake of simplicity we use the term SIM to refer to boththe SIM (2G) and USIM (3G and 4G) applications and thephysical smart card containing them.1making them into very cheap (below $100,-) IMSI catchers4.Over time, the commercial IMSI catchers were extendedwith a lot of additional functionality such as eavesdroppingon wireless calls. However, they are still, rather euphemisti-cally, called IMSI catchers. This leads to a lot of confusionon what is meant by an IMSI catching attack. For this ar-ticle, we refer only to the gathering of IMSI numbers fromthe air waves (either passive or active) as IMSI catching.Recent news stories uncovered widespread use of unreg-ulated IMSI catchers. In an article from The WashingtonPost researchers found 18 IMSI catchers in Washington D.C.within two days 5. These IMSI catchers were present at air-fields and embassies and could be detected since they actu-ally ran active Man-in-the-Middle attacks, possibly to eaves-drop on mobile connections. So, traditional IMSI catchers,as discussed in this article, might be even more widespread.The FCC started an internal task force to study the use ofIMSI catchers by criminals and foreign intelligence agencies6, indicating that these attacks are considered a seriousissue.Location privacyIMSI catching attacks mostly relate to the issue of loca-tion privacy, as the transmission of your IMSI reveals yourapproximate location. Location privacy attacks attempt tolink an identity to a location. By keeping one of these (iden-tity or location) fixed and trying to recover the other, weidentify two different goals of location privacy attacks:Retrieving identities at a location (monitoring)A list of caught IMSIs can reveal who came at whattime within, for example, the near vicinity of a spe-cific building, or was present at a certain rally. Suchmonitoring is also used for commercial goals such ascustomer monitoring. We have seen that shop keep-ers already collect WiFi signals from phones to deter-mine statistics such as returning customers or the ef-fectiveness of their shop front 7. IMSI catching couldbe used not only to invade privacy but also for ac-tual physical attacks. Consider, as (dramatic) exam-ple, automated terrorist attacks that trigger bombs toexplode when high-value targets come in range of anIMSI catcher 8, 9.Retrieving a persons location (tracking)Recovering a persons geographic movements can re-veal a lot about what they do and who they meet.As IMSI catching requires the operation of rogue celltowers or passive listening antennas in the vicinity ofthe victim(s), it seems most useful for monitoring at-tacks. In GSM a cell tower can service an area up to34 kilometers in diameter, so the vicinity is in the or-der of several kilometers. For actual tracking over alarger area, an attacker would need a mobile setup ora network of antennas. This is not unthinkable, forexample the city of London initiated a project wheretrash cans monitor WiFi signals of mobile phones toprofilepeoples behavior in order tosend them targetedadvertisements 10.Traditionally, IMSI catching is associated with a more hy-brid attack where police forces use IMSI catching to recoverinformation about the mobile subscription of a target 11.They follow a target and gather a list of active IMSI num-bers in several unrelated crowds on independent locationsand intersect the recovered sets of IMSI numbers. The le-gitimacy of this method is debatable, especially since theyoften transmit signals from fake cell-towers which interferewith genuine cell-towers. Furthermore, this technique seemsto be used unregulated by several entities, such as intelli-gence agencies and malicious adversaries 5, 12.ContributionThis paper demonstrates that the weak protection againstunauthorized identification of SIM cards in mobile networksis not a necessity, as is often claimed. Furthermore, wepropose a solution which defeats the IMSI catching attacksand increases the credibility of the mutual authenticationwith the home network. The latter has significant impactagainst man-in-the-middle attacks such as presented in 13,and provides additional security to 2G networks which cur-rently only support a unilateral authentication procedure.Our solution was formally verified using ProVerif and doesnot interfere with the workings of the networks as they aredefined today, and is in fact backwards compatible with cur-rent implementations. The only party that would need tomake a change would be the mobile providers, as they pro-vision the user with an IMSI and the SIM that contains itand are also the only party in control of the authentica-tion server, where the IMSIs are linked to the authentica-tion parameters (keys and algorithms). Every provider canindependently decide whether to implement this solution,and as our solution changes nothing in the message defini-tions a change happens transparently for any intermediateproviders.OverviewWe continue with some background information about mo-bile networks in Section 2. This section not only discussesidentification in mobile networks, but also looks at authen-tication, since our solution requires a change of a parameterof one of the authentication messages. Section 3 describesour solution against IMSI catching for the current technol-ogy and provides the general idea of our solution. Section 4describes our solution modified for the older, but still heav-ily used 2G technology. We formally verify our solution inSection 5, as well as analyze the effectiveness and conse-quences of implementing it. Finally, we review related workin Section 6 and draw conclusions in Section 7.2. BACKGROUNDIMSI catching is an issue in what is often called the 3GPPor GSM family of cellular technology; world-wide this is by-far the most popular of the mobile telecommunication sys-tems. This family of algorithms started in the early 90swith the introduction of GSM, which was then 2nd gener-ation mobile technology. Currently, we are seeing the de-ployment of the 4G networks (LTE and LTE+). Withineach generation there have been incremental improvementsmostly to the up- and down-link speed (e.g. HSDPA+ overUMTS in 3G), but the protocols themselves only receive realchanges with the move to a newer generation. As previouslystated, the IMSI catching problem exists in all generations.This following sections give some background into specificsof the 3GPP networks that are relevant for the IMSI catch-ing dilemma. In Section 2.4 we describe 3G authentication2in more detail, both as an example and because we use theauthentication messages in our solution.2.1 Identification within 3GPP networksCell towers in mobile networksidentifythemselvesbybroad-casting identifiers. Mobile phones pick up these signals anddecide whether to connect to a network or not. This de-cision is based on data from the SIM, which instructs thephone to look out for certain networks by both frequencyand identifier. When a mobile phone connects to a network,it first requests a channel to exchange information on withthe cell tower. On this channel the cell tower can alwaysrequest the SIMs identity. Identification is performed aftera simple command from the cell tower to a mobile phone.This command, Identity request, specifies a specific identifier(IMSI, TMSI, IMEI or IMEI(SV), see Section 2.2), to whichthe phone responds with a so-called Identity response con-taining the requested identifier 14, 15. Authentication canonly take place after identification, because the authentica-tion is based on a symmetric key shared between the SIMand provider.Interestingly, the specifications of the mobile standardsacknowledge the problems of IMSI catching. In 16 sev-eral security goals for mobile networks are stated, amongwhich are confidentiality of the IMSI (user identity confi-dentiality), user location confidentiality and user untrace-ability (Section 5.1.1 of 16). The same document acknowl-edges the breach of user identity confidentiality introducedwith the request identification message (Section 6.2 of 16),though no breach of the location privacy issues is mentionedhere. The specifications further mandate that a SIM doesnot answer Identity request messages asking for any identi-fier, other then the IMSI, when no encryption context is yetestablished (Section of 15). This, of course, wouldnot prevent IMSI catching, but does prevent the leaking ofthe other identifiers to IMSI catchers. However, our experi-ments show that all of the current 3G or 4G enabled phonesand SIM cards we tested also transmit the TMSI and IMEIunprotected when requested.2.2 3GPP identifiersWhile this article is mostly concerned with protecting theIMSI, many more identifiers exist in the 3GPP networks.We discuss the most important of these briefly below.International Mobile Subscriber Identifier (IMSI)The IMSI is the main identifier in 3GPP networks and be-longs to one specific SIM card. It is a 15 digit numberwherethe first three digits identify the home country (MCC, Mo-bile Country Code), the following two or three digits iden-tify the home network (MNC, Mobile Network Code). Theremaining nine or ten digits identify the specific user/SIMwithin the providers database.Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identifier (TMSI)The TMSI is introduced to protect against traceability ofusers. The TMSI is a temporary pseudonym provided tothe mobile device by the network, to use instead of theIMSI, essentially masking the IMSI against passive attacks.The TMSI is only valid within a certain geographical area.When a mobile phone moves to another area it initiates alocation update procedure, which should provide it with anew TMSI. The time a single TMSI remains valid is con-figurable by the serving network. Since all communica-tion with the mobile phone should be based on the TMSI3,phones are traceable via the TMSI during a validity pe-riod. TMSIs do not provide adequate protection againstIMSI catching attacks though, since a cell tower can al-ways request a phones IMSI. TMSIs are therefore easilydefeated by active IMSI catching attacks. Furthermore,research shows that in practice TMSIs remain valid for fartoo long and are re-used over different areas 17, makingthem even usable in passive IMSI catching attacks.International Mobile Equipment Identifier (IMEI)The IMEI is a 15 digit number that identifies the mobiledevice itself. It is included to make black-listing of stolenphones possible. There is a closely related alternative tothe IMEI, often referred to as IMEI(SV), which is one digitlonger and also identifies the software version running onthe phone.Other identifiersThere are several other ways to identify a mobile devicebased on its transmissions, for instance the phones answerto authentication requests. Because these requests are an-swered based on a shared secret key, the same challengealways invokes the same response. There are also severalways to identify a mobile device outside of the 3GPP pro-tocols. Examples of these include the MAC address of theWiFi or Bluetooth adapter.2.3 Authentication within 3GPP networksFor all 3GPP systems the customers SIM card sharesa (set of) secret key(s) with the authentication server ofhis provider. Any authentication and encryption of mes-sages is performed with temporary keys derived from theseshared secret keys. The link between a SIMs unique iden-tifier (IMSI) and its secret keys is made either through adiversified key solution or a simple look-up table. Once theSIM has been identified, the network can look-up the ac-companying secret key and initiate authentication.It is important to note that the party authenticating themobile device does not need to be the users own provider.A mobile device can be roaming, i.e. using the networkof another provider. We call the network with which themobile device is currently connected the serving network,and the network of the users provider the home network(see Figure 1).Figure 1: Schematic overview of the division between theserving network and the home network.The serving network starts a challenge-response protocolwith the SIM, which authenticates the SIM and establishes(a) sessions key(s). When using 3G or 4G technologies, thechallenge sent by the serving network also authenticates thehome network, for 2G technologies there is only SIM-only3Phones can also still be paged using their IMSI numbers,and listening on paging channels shows that this occurs fre-quently.3authentication. Since only the authentication server withinthe home network and the SIM know the secret key, theserving network is not capable of authenticating (to) theSIM. Obviously, it would be unacceptable