<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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+ <item>
+ <title>Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 9 Aug 2017 23:59:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
+web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
+<a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
+to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
+DVB-T software defined radios. The article refered to instructions
+and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
+Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
+
+<p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
+bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
+and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
+scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
+Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
+stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
+some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe
+working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
+and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
+gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
+gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
+Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to
+do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
+
+<p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
+loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
+packages with IMSI numbers in them. The code is fairly short and easy
+to understand. The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
+to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
+and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
+network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
+default). This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
+collector for a few days now.</p>
+
+<p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+<li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
+
+<li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
+<a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
+
+<li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
+
+<li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
+where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
+found a GSM station).</li>
+
+<li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+<p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
+running, I decided to package
+<a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
+for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
+#871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
+Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
+know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
+commercial tools like
+<a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
+Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
+Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
+more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
+is easily tracked. Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
+I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
+wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
+track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
+police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
+of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
+of government officials...</p>
+
+<p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
+script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
+the GSM network. It will only collect one frequency at the time,
+while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
+phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
+program. Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
+simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
+parser code. I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
+one frequency?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Thu, 9 Mar 2017 15:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
-computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
-was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
-file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
-shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without
-risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been
-obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is
-possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote>
-nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
-<br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
-</blockquote></p>
-
-<p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
-be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other
-messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
-are noticed.</p>
-
-<p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
-code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
-it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
-time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a
-bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
-/proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
-
-<p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
-same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
-mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
-I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
-points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
-view), but that does not worry me.</p>
-
-<p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-[...]
-device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
-device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
- opts: rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
- age: 7863311
- caps: caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
- sec: flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
- events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
- bytes: 166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
- RPC iostats version: 1.0 p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
- xprt: tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
- per-op statistics
- NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
- GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
- SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
- LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
- ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
- READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
- READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
- WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
- CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
- MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
- SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
- MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
- REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
- RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
- RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
- LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
- READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
- READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
- FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
- FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
- PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
- COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-
-device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
-[...]
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
-It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
-operation. Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts. If these
-numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
-hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
-away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
-while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the
-defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
-timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
-mount options.</p>
-
-<p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
-Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
-But according to
-<ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
-10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
-command can be used to get these timeout values. But this do not work
-on Linux, as far as I can tell. I
-<ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
-but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
-
-<p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
-experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are
-affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
-network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very
-much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
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