When You Roam, You’re Not Alone

January 1, 2024
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Thursday, December 28, 2023, 9:37 AM

A fix is long overdue for one of the most extensive, yet lesser-known surveillance risks of our age: the technical vulnerabilities at the heart of the world’s mobile communications networks.

“Cell Tower” (Andrew Currie, http://tinyurl.com/3yhewb54; CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

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We’ve all been there before: You’re traveling abroad, and as your plane lands and is taxiing to the gate, you reach for your phone, wait for it to connect to the local network, and then you are greeted with a text message: “Welcome abroad, you’re now roaming!” Beyond the exorbitant fees, few of us are likely to give the matter much thought.

However, hidden within this seemingly routine transaction lies one of the most extensive, yet lesser-known surveillance risks of our age: the technical vulnerabilities at the heart of the world’s mobile communications networks. Accompanying the complex arrangement of global networks, international roaming service providers, and financial agreements are surveillance actors who access and covertly manipulate decades-old protocols to extract your sensitive personal information from the mobile network. Human rights and national security risks abound. A new report by the Citizen Lab (a research center with which we are affiliated) details how it all works.

Telecommunications companies constantly exchange huge volumes of messages using a private global network to “signal” when users attempt to roam and use services on partner networks in virtually any country around the world. This private network, called the IP Exchange (IPX), was originally conceived to provide a single connection from one mobile network to other partner networks to facilitate the transport of signaling messages needed for ubiquitous international roaming. Because these signaling messages provide essential user authentication, registration, and service information, they also allow telecommunications companies to retrieve extraordinarily detailed information about a user, including whether a phone number is active, which services are available to them, to which network the phone is currently connected, and most importantly, where they are geolocated at any time relative to the multitude of cell towers to which they connect as they traverse a city.

While at one time this information was restricted to a relatively small club of mobile telecommunications companies, membership has since diversified to private companies selling geolocation surveillance services. Some of these entities gain access to these highly sensitive signaling protocols by buying entry into the club from country network operators seeking more profit—such as small Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, eastern European, and African-based telecommunications firms as revealed in a 2020 article by the Guardian. In other cases, telecommunications firms are compelled by their country’s government to integrate a vendor’s software system into country networks to become an element of their surveillance apparatus—allowing that vendor to access the location and communications of domestic users or those using other country networks connected to the IPX.

Once inside the club, these private surveillance vendors have free rein to act as a telecommunications firm to exchange the same signaling messages but exploit this access to covertly track individuals, disrupt their cell phone services, or even intercept their text messages and voice calls. The surveillance vendors then sell the data and access to government law enforcement or security services. Figure 1 shows how a surveillance actor who enters into financial agreements with mobile network operators and an IPX network provider can acquire the routing addresses and access needed, acting as a roaming partner network, but to surveil users on unprotected networks.

Figure 1. Threat landscape for foreign network-based geolocation tracking.

Moreover, this surveillance capability is not limited to older 3G technologies. The surveillance techniques that have been available to exploit 3G networks for 20 years are also widely used in 4G and 5G networks. Sophisticated surveillance firms often use techniques that involve equivalent signaling messages concurrently on all three network types to trick a targeted network into sending them your location information. Naturally, governments are eager consumers of such services, especially those that lack their own sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities. Why spend money building your own National Security Agency (NSA)-style surveillance system when you can simply buy one off the shelf?

Providing these types of tracking abilities to law enforcement or security agencies, many of whom have terrible human rights records and are implicated in acts of domestic and transnational repression, is a recipe for abuses, abductions, and even murder.

To read the rest of the article: When You Roam, You’re Not Alone