Recent advances in GSM insecurities

GSM is one of the most widely used standards in the world with more than 1.5 billion users. Privacy, interception and theft of service continue to raise significant interest in GSM community. Security issues in GSM standard, along with software flaws in GSM implementations, were for a long time only theoretical. In the last few years hardware and software, which can be used for various attacks on GSM networks, have become widely available. Recently it became possible, with right set of tools, to practically exploit above referenced security issues. This paper gives a theoretical overview of the GSM network architecture, describes different attack vectors, as well as both hardware and software tools available. Having adequate tools and relevant knowledge, a GSM security researcher can easily build his own GSM network, and use it as a test bed to perform attacks on end-user and operator network side.