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by ChuckMcM 3304 days ago
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...

1 comments

"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 ...