Hacker News Reader

So the people who make the 3G and 4G standards made them pretty secure. Those are not broken. What's broken is the implementation. The carriers are not the ones developing the technology, so they do boneheaded things like making the client identifiers sequential or using the wrong verification schemes. I would be willing to bet that if there is some kind of exploit here, it's due to the specific implementation.

View on HN

Exactly, it sounds as if the mitm attack wasn't based on hijacking a broadcast, but on redirecting data/voice/sms/etc. from a cracked device to a network of the attacker's choosing. The redirection wasn't based on fooling the phone into connecting , it was based on explicitly changing the network the phone connected to.

A very interesting attack, but not interesting in the sense that cdma/wimax (perhaps LTE too?) is unsafe but in the sense that there are serious vulnerabilities in the network stack for android.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com