This is a beginners workshop to understand the basics on telecommunication security and get started with the area. Telecommunication security is such a relevant field because of its massive impact as each and everyone of us owns a phone with a SIM card, uses 2G/3G or 4G technology. Even the new IoT world including critical devices such as health equipments, cars, and so on has a telco element attached to it. It is an unavoidable element of todays networks and communication. With this training, the main goal is to throw some light on the security aspects of telecommunication networks from a pentester's view.
There will be mainly three different handson sections during this training. They are as follows:
In this section, you will learn to build your own base station connecting your phone to the core network that you build yourself. We will focus only on GSM (2G) internals during the hands on.
- Using sysmoBTS - which is a hardware specifically build for GSM networks.
In this section, you will learn to play with SIM cards - reading, writing and sniffing. We will mainly use a smart card reader with a USB. We will also use simTrace, which is a MitM utility for sniffing SIM traffic between the SIM and the phone.
In this section, the main goal is to learn to setup a MitM setup for testing VoLTE. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is a recent voice technology where voice is transfered on the data network over 4G/LTE. We learn to look at the VoLTE traffic coming from a SIM card towards the provider. We also learn to inject traffic from our burp instance and route it via the radio channel in an android phone.