During a session at the Chaos Computer Club Congress (CCC) in Berlin, Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut used cheap Motorola handsets running a replacement firmware based on open source code to intercept data coming from a network base station.
Using this, they were able to locate the unique ID for any phone using this base, breaking the encryption keys with a rainbow table lookup. According to the BBC report, this was only possible because the Motorola handsets in question had been reverse engineered after an unspecified leak.
GSM technology is used in 80 percent of the world's mobile phone calls, and has been the subject of previous security research .
Earlier, a hardware hacking expert at Defcon18 successfully faked several attendees' cell phones into connecting to his phony GSM base station during a live demonstration.
He built the International Mobile Subscribe Identity Catcher, a phony GSM tower/base station, costing about $1,500 using open-source technology. The setup also used two directional antennas, and a Debian laptop running OpenBTS and Asterisk, an open source tool that turns a computer into a voice communications server.
References:
http://www.darkreading.com/security/attacks-breaches/226500010/index.html
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010311-researchers-hack-gsm-mobile-calls.html?source=nww_rss
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