Essay/Term paper: Cellular phreaking

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Politics

Cellular Phreaking


The cellular/mobile phone system is one that is perfectly set up to be
exploited by phreaks with the proper knowledge and equipment. Thanks to
deregulation, the regional BOC's (Bell Operating Companies) are scattered and do
not communicate much with each other. Phreaks can take advantage of this by
pretending to be mobile phone customers whose "home base" is a city served by a
different BOC, known as a "roamer". Since it is impractical for each BOC to
keep track of the customers of all the other BOC's, they will usually allow the
customer to make the calls he wishes, often with a surcharge of some sort.
The bill is then forwarded to the roamer's home BOC for collection. However,
it is fairly simple (with the correct tools) to create a bogus ID number for
your mobile phone, and pretend to be a roamer from some other city and state,
that's "just visiting". When your BOC tries to collect for the calls from your
alleged "home BOC", they will discover you are not a real customer; but by then,
you can create an entirely new electronic identity, and use that instead.
How does the cellular system know who is calling, and where they are? When a
mobile phone enters a cell's area of transmission, it transmits its phone number
and its 8 digit ID number to that cell, who will keep track of it until it gets
far enough away that the sound quality is sufficiently diminished, and then the
phone is "handed off" to the cell that the customer has walked or driven into.
This process continues as long as the phone has power and is turned on. If the
phone is turned off (or the car is), someone attempting to call the mobile phone
will receive a recording along the lines of "The mobile phone customer you have
dialed has left the vehicle or driven out of the service area." When a call is
made to a mobile phone, the switching equipment will check to see if the mobile
phone being called is "logged in", so to speak, or present in one of the cells.
If it is, the call will then act (to the speaking parties) just like a normal
call - the caller may hear a busy tone, the phone may just ring, or the call may
be answered.
How does the switching equipment know whether or not a particular phone is
authorized to use the network? Many times, it doesn't. When a dealer installs
a mobile phone, he gives the phone's ID number (an 8 digit hexadecimal number)
to the local BOC, as well as the phone number the BOC assigned to the customer.
Thereafter, whenever a phone is present in one of the cells, the two numbers are
checked - they should be registered to the same person. If they don't match,
the telco knows that an attempted fraud is taking place (or at best, some
transmission error) and will not allow calls to be placed or received at that
phone. However, it is impractical (especially given the present state of
deregulation) for the telco to have records of every cellular customer of every
BOC. Therefore, if you're going to create a fake ID/phone number combination,
it will need to be "based" in an area that has a cellular system (obviously),
has a different BOC than your local area does, and has some sort of a "roamer"
agreement with your local BOC.
How can one "phreak" a cellular phone? There are three general areas when
phreaking cellular phones; using one you found in an unlocked car (or an
unattended walk-about model), modifying your own chip set to look like a
different phone, or recording the phone number/ID number combinations sent by
other local cellular phones, and using those as your own. Most cellular phones
include a crude "password" system to keep unauthorized users from using the
phone - however, dealers often set the password (usually a 3 to 5 digit code)
to the last four digits of the customer's mobile phone number. If you can find
that somewhere on the phone, you're in luck. If not, it shouldn't be TOO hard
to hack, since most people aren't smart enough to use something besides "1111",
"1234", or whatever. If you want to modify the chip set in a cellular phone you
bought (or stole), there are two chips (of course, this depends on the model and
manufacturer, yours may be different) that will need to be changed - one
installed at the manufacturer (often epoxied in) with the phone's ID number, and
one installed by the dealer with the phone number, and possible the security
code. To do this, you'll obviously need an EPROM burner as well as the same
sort of chips used in the phone (or a friendly and unscrupulous dealer!). As to
recording the numbers of other mobile phone customers and using them; as far as
I know, this is just theory... but it seems quite possible, if you've got the
equipment to record and decode it. The cellular system would probably freak out
if two phones (with valid ID/phone number combinations) were both present in the
network at once, but it remains to be seen what will happen.