LTE Sniffing

the O Reilly connection

I bought a SDR dongle not long ago. It's just a basic 30 euro one with a maximum capacity of 1.75 GHz.

I have been reading some forums about sniffing telephone networks and some guys with the same dongle sniff GSM networks.

They say that you can see the IMSI number of telephones connected to the networks and other information phones broadcast. However these GSM networks are decommissioned in most areas now including mine.

I was told that you can sniff 3G and 4G networks with higher end SDRs such as the HackRF and BladeRF which reach frequency levels way above 2GHz.

I was wondering if it is possible to gather the same kind of information with these higher end dongles?

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058353421/lte-sniffing

Darren Kitchen has done a series of videos on GSM sniffing with an SDR. Matter of interest, which one have you got? I've tracked ships using mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqtJ-TvtLTQ

the O Reilly connection

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190335#Comment_122190335

RTL SDR

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190382#Comment_122190382

Same as me and same as the one in the video I posted. Actually I bought mine from the lovely Shannon Morse.

the O Reilly connection

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190612#Comment_122190612

What OS are you using? I'm using Dragon OS. it has quite a few programs on it for radio analysis. I mainly use GQRX and Grgsm. Getting the hang of radio decoding is the tricky part. I recently installed the Kaffeine media player and I can watch TV on it with the rtl sdr.

the O Reilly connection

It turns out I hadn't the OS hard installed. I was using virtual box and unbeknownst to me this causes problems with GRGSM. Also, i was using the three network so any 2G networks in the area weren't showing up because they don't use them!

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122278539#Comment_122278539

That would cause you problems alright :D

I use Debian on both my laptop and both servers. All tools available on Kali work on Debian because Kali is Debian based. I don't like running Kali on bare metal.

the O Reilly connection

I was having a look at a video online and there was a guy sniffing a LTE tower with a BladeRf with a long range antenna attached. He didn't say how far he could sniff a tower from but it looks like it was from over a mile away. It would be interesting to know what range something like that could have.