03-01-2013, 11:27 AM
MOBILE PHONE CLONING
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ABSTRACT:
Mobile communication has been readily available for several years, and is major business today. It provides a valuable service to its users who are willing to pay a considerable premium over a fixed line phone, to be able to walk and talk freely. Because of its usefulness and the money involved in the business, it is subject to fraud. Unfortunately, the advance of security standards has not kept pace with the dissemination of mobile communication.
Some of the features of mobile communication make it an alluring target for criminals. It is a relatively new invention, so not all people are quite familiar with its possibilities, in good or in bad. Its newness also means intense competition among mobile phone service providers as they are attracting customers. The major threat to mobile phone is from cloning.
Are your mobile phone bills unexpectedly high? There’s a chance you are the victim of ‘‘mobile cloning’’. It is also known as cell phone piracy and has been taking place throughout
the world since decades. Recently this crime has come to India. Mobile phones have become a major part of our everyday life. On the one hand, India’s mobile phone market has grown rapidly in the last few years on the back of falling phone tariffs and handset prices, making it one of the fastest growing markets globally. On the other the number of mobile phone subscribers is exceeding that of fixed-line users. The mobile phone subscriber base has already crossed the 50 mn mark.Today millions of mobile phones users, be it Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), run the risk of having their phones cloned. And the worst part is that there isn’t much that you can do to prevent this.
Such crime first came to light in January 2005 when the Delhi police arrested a person with 20 cell phones, a laptop, a SIM scanner, and a writer. The accused was running an exchange illegally wherein he cloned CDMA-based mobile phones. He used software for the cloning and provided cheap international calls to Indian immigrants in West Asia. A similar racket came to light in Mumbai resulting in the arrest of four mobile dealers
INTRODUCTION
Cell phone cloning is copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another mobile telephone.Usually this is done for the purpose of making fraudulent telephone calls. The bills for the calls go to the legitimate subscriber. The cloner is also able to make effectively anonymous calls, which attracts another group of interested users. Cloning is the process of taking the programmed information that is stored in a legitimate mobile phone and illegally programming the identical information into another mobile phone. The result is that the "cloned" phone can make and receive calls and the charges for those calls are billed to the legitimate subscriber. The service provider network does not have a way to differentiate between the legitimate phone and the "cloned" phone.
Phone cloning is a practice where someone hacks a cell phone to associate its identifying data with that of another unit. This effectively allows people to make calls anonymously, as the calls will be mistakenly traced to another individual. It also allows people to make free calls, since the bill goes to the person with the original model. In most nations, phone cloning is a form of fraud and is considered illegal, with heavy penalties, since it involves tampering with telecommunications devices. People who believe they may have been victims of this technique should report it to their cell carriers immediately.
Every handset has two paired pieces of data used by the provider to identify it, the electronic serial number (ESN) and mobile identification number (MIN). Someone who wants to clone aphone can illegally access cell signals to harvest this data, and then reprogram the chip inside a phone to get it to transmit the ESN and MIN of another model. The cloned phone's radio signal will still be slightly different, and this can allow the provider to catch it.
People engage in this activity for a variety of reasons, ranging from wanting an anonymousphone to use for illegal activities to not being able to afford cell service. In regions with a large immigrant community, entrepreneurs may sell cloned phones to people who want to be able to place calls to their home nations. People use them until the provider catches on, and then abandon them for cloned replacements.
Victims of phone cloning will notice changes on their bills, usually a drastic spike in charges with calls to numbers they do not recognize. People may also send texts with cloned phone.Some victims report issues like missing calls or being unable to place outgoing calls and texts. Anyone who notices something irregular should contact the cell provider to report it.
While mobile cloning is an emerging threat for Indian subscribers, it has been happening in other telecom markets since the 1990s, though mostly with regard to CDMA phones. Pleas in an US District Court in 1997 effectively ended West Texas authorities' first case of `phone cloning.' Authorities in the case estimated the loss at $3,000 to $4,000 for each number used. Southwestern Bell claims wireless fraud costs the industry $650 million each year in the US. Some federal agents in the US have called phone cloning an especially `popular' crime because it is hard to trace. Back home, police officers say the Yasin case is just the tip of the iceberg and have asked operators to improve their technology. But the operators claim they can't do much for now. "It's like stealing cars or duplicating credit card numbers. The service providers cannot do much except keep track of the billing pattern of the users. But since the billing cycle is monthly, the damage is done by the time we can detect the mischief," says a Reliance executive.
Qualcomm, which develops CDMA technology globally, says each instance of mobile hacking is different and therefore there is very little an operator can do to prevent hacking. "It's like a virus hitting the computer. Each software used to hack into the network is different, so operators can only keep upgrading their security firewall as and when the hackers strike," says a Qualcomm executive.
When we look up the dictionary meaning of cloning it states, “ to create the exact replica or a mirror image of an subject understudy. The subject can be any thing living or non-living so here we take into consideration the cellular or mobile phones. So Mobile cloning is copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another mobile telephone. Every electronic device has a working frequency, which plays a crucial role in its operation this we shall discuss later. Now the question that arises is how is a mobile phone cloned. I shall be discussing this in detail, because it is a very complex procedure in which we have to be familiar with the following terms.
WHEN DID CELL CLONING START?
The early 1990s were boom times for eavesdroppers. Any curious teenager with a £100 Tandy Scanner could listen in to nearly any analogue mobile phone call. As a result, Cabinet Ministers, company chiefs and celebrities routinely found their most intimate conversations published in the next day's tabloids
Cell phone cloning started with Motorola "bag" phones and reached its peak in the mid 90's with a commonly available modification for the Motorola "brick" phones, such as the Classic, the Ultra Classic, and the Model 8000.
GSM
Global System for Mobile Communications. A digital cellular phone technology based on TDMA. GSM phones use a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card that contains user account information. Any GSM phone becomes immediately programmed after plugging in the SIM card, thus allowing GSM phones to be easily rented or borrowed.Operators who provide GSM service are Airtel,Hutch etc.
GSM is a digital mobile telephone system that is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world. GSM uses a variation of TDMA and is the most widely used of the three digital wireless telephone technologies. GSM digitizes and compresses data, then sends it down a channel with two other streams of user data, each in its own time slot. It operates at either the 900 MHz or 1,800 MHz frequency band.
Some other important terms whose knowledge is necessary are
1) IMEI
2) SIM
3) ESN
4) MIN
IMEI is an abbreviation for International Mobile Equipment Identifier, this is a 10 digit universally unique number of our GSM handset. Universally Unique because there cannot be two mobile phones having the same IMEI no. This is a very valuable number and used in tracking mobile phones.
SIM, which stands for Subscriber Identification Module. The sim has survived and evolved.
Earlier the mobiles had the entire sim card to be inserted in them such sim’s are called IDG-1 Sims. The other in which we small part of the card which has the chip is inserted in the mobile and is known as PLUG-IN Sims.
Basically the SIM provides storage of subscriber related information of three types:
1. Fixed data stored before the subscription is sold
2. Temporary network data
3. Service related data.
ESN, which stands for Electronic Serial Number. It is same as the IMEI but is used in CDMA handsets.
MIN stands for Mobile Identification Number, which is the same as the SIM of GSM.
The basic difference between a CDMA handset and a GSM handset is that a CDMA handset has no sim i.e. the CDMA handset uses MIN as its Sim, which cannot be replaced as in GSM. The MIN chip is embedded in the CDMA hand set.
Indications are that the GSM industry is taking steps to repair the security weaknesses in the GSM cryptographic algorithms. A patched version of COMP128 is now available (called COMP128-2), although it remains unpublished.
Most importantly, the GSM industry appears to have at least partially learned the important lesson here: `security through obscurity doesn't work'. The next-generation replacement for GSM, called 3GPP, will use algorithms developed based on principles from the research literature. The 3GPP cryptographic algorithms have been published for scientists to study, which gives the research community a chance to give early warning of any potential weaknesses and also to gain confidence in the 3GPP ciphers. I am strongly supportive of this effort.
Note that the other major players in this arena moved some time ago to open design processes. This includes the next-generation AES standard process being shepherded by the US government, as well as the US cellular industry. The US cellular industry is an interesting case study: initially they used closed design, but after several of their cryptographic algorithms were rapidly broken by cryptographers in the open research community, to their credit they quickly moved to an open design process. I am glad that the GSM/3GPP industry has recognized the benefits of this approach.
I also understand that the GSM Association has agreed to develop a new, stronger voice encryption cipher called A5/3, apparently based on Kasumi (a block cipher which was developed based on principles from the research literature). It will apparently become mandatory to support A5/3 at some point in the future. I strongly support the GSM Association's efforts to repair the ailing series of voice privacy algorithms and provide robust voice privacy protection for the future.
CDMA
Code Division Multiple Access. A method for transmitting simultaneous signals over a shared portion of the spectrum. There is no Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card unlike in GSM.Operators who provides CDMA service in India are Reliance and Tata Indicom.
CDMA is one of the newer digital technologies used in Canada, the US, Australia, and some South-eastern Asian countries (e.g. Hong Kong and South Korea). CDMA differs from GSM and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) by its use of spread spectrum techniques for transmitting voice or data over the air. Rather than dividing the radio frequency spectrum into separate user channels by frequency slices or time slots, spread spectrum technology separates users by assigning them digital codes within the same broad spectrum. Advantages of CDMA include higher user capacity and immunity from interference by other signal.