April 6, 2018

Purdue prof on D.C. phone tracking: ‘The technology to do this isn’t difficult to construct’

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The discovery of deployed technology that would enable foreign governments, criminal syndicates, or other entities to track smartphones in Washington, D.C., should be no surprise, says Purdue computer science professor Eugene Spafford.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday (April 3) that the Department of Homeland Security suspects unauthorized surveillance devices, called “IMI trackers” or more commonly “Stingrays,” have been tracking smartphones in the D.C. area by mimicking wireless carrier phone towers, inducing them to connect. The ubiquity of phone tracking technology and the international customer base of the American company that manufactures Stingrays, Harris Corp., could mean multiple entities are suspects.

“Similar incidents, supposedly by accident, manipulate routing and interception of internet messages,” said Spafford, who is executive director emeritus of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). “It’s not a big leap to see other countries building their own cellphone interception devices, not only for domestic use, but also to deploy it in other countries to gain access to things they see of value.”

The technology behind Stingrays also precedes their use in D.C. and is found in other applications.

“The technology to do this isn’t difficult. The cellphone standards are published. Someone with sufficient resources who thought of this could reverse-engineer the technology into doing something else,” Spafford said.

Domestically, the use of phone tracking technology by law enforcement agencies for targeting criminals brings up issues of privacy challenged in court but not yet resolved. “Once it was developed, companies realized they could sell these to law enforcement agencies around the U.S. The interception has been not only of suspects, but of everyone else in the vicinity,” Spafford said.

The surprise isn’t that unauthorized groups might be intercepting cellular communication in D.C., but that they haven’t done it sooner. “It’s possible this has been going on for some time and we’re only now hearing about it,” Spafford said.

Writer: Kayla Wiles, 765-494-2432, wiles5@purdue.edu 

Source: Eugene Spafford, 765-494-7825, spaf@purdue.edu 

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