How to Block Stingray Devices
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How to Block Stingray Devices
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Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#2Don't all phones have this in "Settings"?
e.g. Settings-Connections-MobileNetworks-NetworkMode
Also, will my phone even bother with 2G if LTE, 4G, or 3G is available?
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#3Don't all phones have this in "Settings"? e.g. Settings-Connections-MobileNetworks-NetworkMode Also, will my phone even bother with 2G if LTE, 4G, or 3G is available?
They can jam the other frequencies so that they aren't available.
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#4Don't all phones have this in "Settings"? e.g. Settings-Connections-MobileNetworks-NetworkMode Also, will my phone even bother with 2G if LTE, 4G, or 3G is available?
You can force a phone into 2G handshaking, that's how stingrays work.
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#5> So they stand between you and the tower and sift through the transmission first. This means they can now intercept data on that transmission. I don’t know what they can do with it, and there is no real clear information on what data they can get. They do say metadata and access the cellphones internal storage, so that is enough to want to block the Stingray.
Cellphones internal storage? Seriously?
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#6Don't all phones have this in "Settings"? e.g. Settings-Connections-MobileNetworks-NetworkMode Also, will my phone even bother with 2G if LTE, 4G, or 3G is available?
You can force a phone into 2G handshaking, that's how stingrays work.
Okay, thanks for the explanation.
Meanwhile, setting my Samsung Galaxy S9 to no-2G gives me a warning message that cannot be dismissed: "This setting turns off 2G service. If 2G service is off, some app..." (the remainder can't be viewed).
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#7Dude doesn’t explain why stingrays are only good on 2G
Also, how to do it on iOS?
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#8> So they stand between you and the tower and sift through the transmission first. This means they can now intercept data on that transmission. I don’t know what they can do with it, and there is no real clear information on what data they can get. They do say metadata and access the cellphones internal storage, so that is enough to want to block the Stingray. Cellphones internal storage? Seriously?
I do not know the specifics of the Stingray, but I can tell you more similair "lawfull interception" devices exist.
These devices "talk" with your Baseband; the radio in your phone that runs it's own OS. Many of these can do DMA to with the memory of your "phone" / ordinary soc.
Theoretically, a exploited baseband could allow the lawfull interception device to read and write to your internal storage and more. I have not read about this happening in the wild yet.
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#9Don't all phones have this in "Settings"? e.g. Settings-Connections-MobileNetworks-NetworkMode Also, will my phone even bother with 2G if LTE, 4G, or 3G is available?
Stingrays already work with 4g. And 5g has many of the same flaws, likely on purpose. We can only hope common criminals will start massively exploiting them if we want real change to happen.
Re: How to Block Stingray Devices
#10> So they stand between you and the tower and sift through the transmission first. This means they can now intercept data on that transmission. I don’t know what they can do with it, and there is no real clear information on what data they can get. They do say metadata and access the cellphones internal storage, so that is enough to want to block the Stingray. Cellphones internal storage? Seriously?
I do not know the specifics of the Stingray, but I can tell you more similair "lawfull interception" devices exist. These devices "talk" with your Baseband; the radio in your phone that runs it's own OS. Many of these can do DMA to with the memory of your "phone" / ordinary soc. Theoretically, a exploited baseband could allow the lawfull interception device to read and write to your internal storage and more. I have…
I can't speak for Google devices but per Apple's iOS security whitepaper (page 41) [1]:
"To protect the device from vulnerabilities in network processor firmware, network interfaces including Wi-Fi and baseband have limited access to application processor memory. When USB or SDIO is used to interface with the network processor, the network processor can’t initiate Direct Memory Access (DMA) transactions to the application processor. When PCIe is used, each network processor is on its own isolated PCIe bus. An IOMMU on each PCIe bus limits the network processor’s DMA access to pages of memory containing its network packets or control structures."
[1]: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....