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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to re-engineer infrastructure so that all cell-sites cryptographically identify themselves so that cellular devices can verify the identity of a cell-site before identifying itself to the cell-site?

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AFIAK 3g and 4g has this. the issue is that there are still legacy 2g and gprs networks so those protocols can't be disabled yet.

shouldnt it be expected that we would be able to prevent our devices to not talk to any non 3/4G tower?

Many phones have this in settings, many other phones have this in a hidden service menu (eg http://android.stackexchange.com/a/66819)

You could, sure... if you could modify the software running on your phone. Since you can't, it's only possible for the (either hardware or software) manufacturer to build in that feature and I'm not sure they have any compelling reason to give the user that option. (It's entirely possible that this option is available on some phones but I really no idea, I haven't used anything other than an iPhone for several years.)

3G networks that still use the A5/1 cipher can also broken with a rainbow table.

>3G networks use the KASUMI block cipher instead of the older A5/1 stream cipher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Security

I don't see any exceptions for this. Can you link to a source that states it's still possible for 3G to use A5/1?

They would just get the keys from the cellular providers-- or rather, the cellular providers would just give them the keys.

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