[rsync]

"You could possibly achieve interesting results with a single handset to keep in your pocket as you go about your day. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is ideal due to the fact that Android apps are written to access low level data from it's baseband which is normally not available to end-user applications."

I don't understand why this is done with apps on mobile phones. It seems to me that all of the "metrics" that we use to determine an IMSI catcher are easily obtained with an SDR - even a cheap RTL-SDR.

Take a look at the scoring system for snoopsnitch:

https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/snoopsnitch/wiki/IMSI_...

Almost all of those indicators can be easily seen with an SDR and various tools like kal/kalibrate, airprobe, gr-gsm, and so on ... further, I suspect there are many more deeper indicators (think nmap, but for GSM stations) that would be seen with an SDR that could not be with a mobile phone, although that is just conjecture...

[ChuckMcM]

Almost entirely because cell phones are both a radio and a computer platform in one battery powered unit. No additional work, and they are small. And generally they get thrown away alot so there are cheap ones on the market.

But to your point, it would be straight forward to build imsi catcher catchers (ic^2 :-) with an SDR setup and with something like the ADALM-PLUTO[1] it would be reasonably cost effective.

[1] http://www.analog.com/en/design-center/evaluation-hardware-a...

[rsync]

"Almost entirely because cell phones are both a radio and a computer platform in one battery powered unit."

Well, sure - but what I am looking at in the article is a phone connected to a rPi, right ?

snoopsnitch does indeed provide a phone-only solution, which is very nice, but the solution in the article does not.

My own testbed is a gigabyte BRIX with a BladeRF attached, but obviously you could go much smaller with a Pi-sized device and an RTL-SDR dongle ...

[sasas]

Looks like it has been done -

https://hackaday.com/2016/08/09/how-to-detect-and-find-rogue...

[grogenaut]

because just about everyone has a smart phone now, and a high percentage of them have an old smart phone (esp in this community). Not everyone has a SDR, which can cost as much as a smart phone. Not everyone wants to build and deploy code vs just download an app. Eg why apple is more popular than linux for desktops. (I use linux).