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Four years ago I put down my notes in a blog post on how to use Ubuntu on a notebook to trace Wi-Fi in combination with Wireshark so I could see the Wi-Fi management frames and also the Wi-Fi portion of each Ethernet frame. Amazingly enough, it still works the same way as it did four years ago so I thought I'd write a quick post and link to the original entry as information about how this is done is not widespread. So here's link to the original post.

Tracing this way is a bit more complicated than the approach with the mini-Wi-Fi-Access point that backhauls its traffic via Ethernet as described in this post from back in November. However, this approach is only good for tracing Ethernet frames and gives no insight into the wireless part. But sometimes that is not necessary anyway, it really depends on what one is looking for.

Back in November I had a post in which I wrote that my next device would be a Fairphone (which has now started shipping). Not because it has revolutionary new features or because it's especially high end, which it is not, but for a number of other reasons.

First of all, I like the idea that people think about how a smartphone can be produced in a fair(er) way for the people and the environment. Also, I like the fact that it is done by a small company and that they are very open about the way the phone is designed and produced. I can identify with their ideas and their motives and that's another important thing that has been missing for me ever since Nokia threw itself (or was thrown?) into Microsoft's grip of death.

Before continuing on the Fairphone, a quick look back to former times: Back in the 2006+ timeframe I could identify with Nokia devices because it was pretty much 'the' company at the time for me that innovated the most around bringing the Internet to mobile devices. At the time, social media was also a new concept and to me their approach appeared to be honest. Sure it was driven by a marketing department but the whole thing was so novel that it was still possible to get engaged with the people there. This interaction got lost on both sides over time as the original people left and as things just became too main stream.

These days, the Internet on mobile devices has gone mainstream so the issue is solved. Sure, there is still innovation but by and large the Internet is mobile now. I'm not mainstream and so wasn't Nokia when they pushed the idea of Internet on mobile so it's difficult for me to identify with large and anonymous corporations spitting out devices in the tens of millions today.

With the Fairphone, to come back on topic, it's different. The company has faces and although I only know all of them but one from their website it's a much more personal approach. Also, I'm happy that I could contribute a bit to the project, by paying up front in November for one thing and having been part of the testing and bug fixing effort for another.

And last but not least the Fairphone, on the technology side, has some features I don't get in any other device in that combination such as dual-SIM capability in combination with a good screen resolution, fast processor and an almost stock Android with root rights so I can tame what Google is doing. I haven't tried yet but I hope this still works.

Thanks for that, Fairphone, I'm sure it will become even more exciting as the story continues.

Recently, a German consumer telecoms magazine published their annual network testing results for network operators in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. If you are interested, P3 has a PDF of the article here. Sorry, it's in German only but even if you don't speak the language, the result tables should nevertheless be discernible.

It's good to see that 80% of their drive route in Germany was covered by LTE networks of two carriers and top speeds of beyond 90 Mbit/s were measured. Also it's interesting that network operators now have the tools to minimize call setup times when a fallback from LTE is necessary. While two network operators still have several seconds of additional delay, one network operator has managed to cut that down to a mere 0.2 seconds as I've already noticed myself back in July.

So far, so good. However, when I was recently on a 10 hour train trip through Germany and Austria I was painfully reminded that network coverage along many rail lines is still very far from perfect. This was made even worse by the train not being a high speed train with 2G/3G repeaters inside and unfortunately insulating windows that do not only keep out the heat or cold but also the wireless networks.

So perhaps it would be time to include train trips through the three countries as another testing criteria in such network tests in 2014 to get an idea as a consumer how well different railway lines are covered and what to expect on trains with/without repeaters and insulating windows. Perhaps this would encourage network operators that want to provide quality coverage to do something about the current state of affairs. And trains are usually full of people being bored and wanting to use their mobile devices so it's a strong sales argument!

In my series on my renewed enthusiasm about Bluetooth (see here and here) I can surprisingly add another entry: Even though it is every now and then amusing to listen to advertisement on the radio I do get bored and annoyed after a while. When recently renting a car for a day and driving overland I got to this point quite quickly. But then I noticed that the car was equipped with a Bluetooth interface for music streaming and telephony. The pairing procedure was not for the faint hearted and one should deny the car's request to access the phone's address book but once done I could stream my music from the phone to the on-board audio system – without advertisement interruptions. Excellent! Voice telephony was also integrated in the system as incoming calls were alerted over the car's loudspeakers.

This quick post was inspired by a comment the previous blog entry about 3G security. As the comment mentioned, 3G security procedures are just used if the SIM card, which should actually be called a UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) these days, contains a USIM (Universal Subscriber Identity Module), i.e. a folder branch and internal logic for 3G security. For details see here.

As also mentioned in the comment, many network operators allow the use of old 2G SIMs (i.e. UICCs with a GSM SIM folder) in their 3G networks. From the outside, a UICC with a 2G SIM and a UICC with a 3G USIM can't be told apart unless the operator has printed something on the SIM that hints its a 3G SIM card. In practice, it's even worse as many network operators still sell 2G UICCs today, probably because they are a couple of cents cheaper.

But this approach now backfires with LTE. Here, the 3GPP specification explicitly states that 2G UICCs can't be used. And indeed, when a user has a 2G SIM card (which he might just have bought recently) he won't be able to use LTE because either the mobile won't even try or because the network rejects the user. I've given it a try and it really doesn't work.

In other words, those network operators on the cheap side will have to exchange a lot of UICCs in the future when they go live with LTE and their customers with an LTE capable device will be stuck in 3G.

One major new feature UMTS introduced when it was designed that GSM did not have was mutual authentication instead of only the device authenticating towards the network. This way, man-in-the-middle attacks can be prevented in which an attacker puts a rouge base station in place and tricks a device into using it instead of the real network. So far I always assumed that the Authentication token (AUTN) that was introduced contained all the magic. But 3G security and ciphering is a bit complex so I never dug down deep enough to actually understand how it really works. Lately, I came across the topic again and this time around I investigated a bit more. So here's how man-in-the-middle attacks are prevented in UMTS:

The story starts with the Authentication token (AUTN). This is a new parameter in UMTS that did not exist in GSM and it is computed in the Home Location Register / Authentication Center (HLR / AuC) and on the SIM card. Input parameters are a random number, which is sent during authentication from the network to the mobile device and the secret key that is only stored in the SIM card and in the Authentication Center and never sent anywhere. Another input parameter I was so far not aware about is a sequence number (SQN) that increases over time. When authentications are performed the mobile device only accepts an AUTN that was generated with a higher sequence number than what it has seen before. In practice, things are a bit complicated by the circuit switched and packet switched core network parts having an individual set of precomputed authentication vectors and each side authenticates a mobile device on its own. In other words sequence numbers increase independently on the core and packet switched side and a mechanism is in place in the mobile device to handle this. How sequence numbers are generated and increased is implementation specific but suffice it to say that the number can only increase and not decrease over time.

At this point we have the AUTN and the sequence number (SEQ) that is encoded in the AUTN to prevent replay attacks, i.e. a reuse of potentially intercepted authentication information. The next and equally vital ingredient is integrity checking of signaling messages that are exchanged between the network and the mobile device. Integrity checking is also based on the secret key and ensures that messages are not altered on the fly by an attacker that has managed to insert itself in the transmission chain. At this point an attacker can still passively eavesdrop on the signaling and user data exchange. Therefore the final ingredient is ciphering of signaling messages and user data to prevent this as well.

To quickly summarize: The following things are needed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and eavesdropping:

• An Authentication Token (AUTN) so the mobile knows the Authentication Center trusts the network which performs authentication

• A Sequence Number (SEQ) embedded in the authentication token to prevent replay attacks

• Integrity checking so an attacker can't act as a man in the middle

• Ciphering to prevent passive eavesdropping

For much more details see this paper from adventurous days back in 2001.

 

Back in April 2013 the Prepaid Wireless Internet Wiki I started many years ago suddenly vanished from the cloud. At the time it was hosted by Wetpaint and I found no way to contact them to find out what happened. Bitten by the cloud, yet again… When I recently searched something on the Internet I suddenly rediscovered the Wiki again, this time hosted on WikiFoundry!

It seems the Wetpaint wikis were at some point bought by WikiFoundry and they put the Prepaid Wireless Internet wiki back online. Gee, well thanks for that! It looks like it hasn't been discovered by many, as there haven't been many modifications since then. But my login data was still valid there so I can still (or again?) administer the site. The new 'owner' was also nice enough to provide an export option. Thanks, that's great, just in case this arrangement doesn't last, either.

So there we go, I've put a link to the Wiki back on the blog and hope it will be used as it was in the 'old days'.

Cellular antennas are everywhere to be found on top of buildings these days. Those vertically long white antennas, usually three at a time pointing in different directions. But little is known how they look like on the inside. And there must be quite something in them these days as most of them support several independent frequency ranges and also two polarizations per antenna (horizontal and vertical) for MIMO and RX/TX diversity. I've had a number of posts on this blog on antennas over the years and my two favorites are 'Antenna in Ruins' and 'Antenna Stuff'. But so far I've never seen the inside of one. But recently I stumbled over a picture taken in the German Technical Museum and available on Wikipedia here that shows how it looks inside.

One and a half years ago I wrote a blog post about the growing pains of taking the Paris metro and accessing the Internet over the 2G network that just couldn't absorb the load anymore. At the time I noted that there were talks between the metro and one of the French network operators to deploy 3G and LTE in the metro. Sadly enough it still hasn't happened one and a half years later and the 2G network now just fails completely for Internet access. A sad state of affairs. How long do I have to wait before coming back and being positively surprised?

But to end this post with a positive note I'd like to add that outside the metro, using 3G has become a lot simpler from an international roaming point of view now because European roaming data rates of my home network operator have reached a level where day to day web browsing on the mobile and some data from the notebook is affordable enough so I don't have to ration things quite that strictly anymore. Good!

… yes you read right, the upcoming Chaos Communication Congress will have a 100 Gbit/s Ethernet backhaul. When I first read it in the press I had a hard time to believe it but here's the original blog post on the CCC's web site (and they know what they are talking about…)

Last year's congress was attended by 6000 participants. If you divide one value by the other that's 16 Mbit/s per participant if everybody suddenly decided to download something at the same time. As this will unlikely be the case during any moment during the conference you can imagine what kind of connectivity experience one will have there. Unfortunately I've never been able to adapt to their timing. Next year perhaps.

Let's be a bit crazy and compare the 100 Gigabit/s link to, let's say the aggregate throughput of Vodafone Germany on new year's eve 2011 which I calculated was 7.9 Gbit/s. And the fixed line interconnect traffic of the German incumbent the same day peaked at 1.800 Gbit/s as reported here.

100 Gbit/s for 6000 congress participants. Sounds like a very very fat pipe indeed!