On Feb 28, 2008, at 3:05 PM, stephen galowski wrote:
> with regards to gsm and 3g protocols
>
> can a mobile phone with usb cable be connected to a computer , and
> be able to track them
> or would special equipment be needed to do this
If by "GSM and 3G protocols" you're referring to the over-the-air
protocols used between mobile phones over the Um or Uu interface (or
Xyzzy interface or whatever they call it), you would need special
equipment to do that.
As far as I know, the USB connection to a normal mobile phone is used
for stuff such as syncing information between the phone and a
computer, and possibly for tethering the phone to a computer for use
as a modem; it doesn't supply raw over-the-air packet information.
There apparently do exist Special Magical Phones - or Special Magical
Phone Firmware - that might handle that, such as the TEMS Pocket
software from Ericsson:
http://www.ericsson.com/solutions/tems/realtime_diagnostics/downloads/TEMS_Pocket%20_6.0.pdf
although they say it "Supports FTP for network troubleshooting and
logfile transfer", rather than allowing you to plug the z750i into a
computer via USB and pass traffic to the computer in real time.
However, a Google for
"um interface" capture
found
http://thre.at/gsm/
(which raises the questions "which countries have the most interesting
two-letter country codes for use in domain names?" :-)). It refers to
something called a "USRP"; following the link from that page to
http://wiki.thc.org/gsm
and then clicking on "The GSM/USRP Receiver Project" takes you to
http://wiki.thc.org/gsm#head-9e2d9078d8e28d24f20e8fcd7971b2c376f8d0a9
which has a link to
http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki/USRP
as well as to "Ettus Research":
http://www.ettus.com/
from whom you can buy the Universal Software Radio Peripheral.
So it appears you might be able to construct a GSM sniffer from a USRP
board and a bunch of free software, including a Wireshark patch. (It
appears that one of the pieces of free software required is called
"Linux" or "GNU/Linux", depending on which side of that particular
debate you're on :-), i.e. it works by using Linux's tunnel device to
stuff packets into a fake network interface on which Wireshark can
capture. If I had an unlimited amount of free time, it might be fun
to see whether I could construct a libpcap add-on for this, to make it
work on a variety of OSes as a GSM sniffer; unfortunately, I have
substantially less free time than I'd like even for the stuff I'm
already doing....)
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