A research duo comprising of Daniel Komaromy and Nico Golde discovered a weakness in the Samsung phones such as note 4, galaxy s6 and s6 edge called as the “man-in-the-middle”. This weakness lets a third person to snoop in on your phone call without your knowledge.
The “man-in-the-middle” attack will require a base station that will attack the Shannon line of baseband chips. This cheap technique will need a openbts station to connect to the victim handset and should be placed nearby the handset. The phone will automatically connect to the station without any acceptance from the user.
The malicious station then will push a firmware to the phone and baseband processor in the phone that is responsible for all the voice calls will push the phone calls to the malicious base station.
The researchers who found this loop haven’t released the full details of their findings but have sent the information to Samsung in order to find a solution to this problem
“Our example of modifying the baseband to hijack calls is just an example,” Komaromy told Vulture South.
“The idea with hijacking would be that you can redirect calls to a proxy (like a SIP proxy) and that way you can man-in-the-middle the call.
“So that means the caller sees her original call connected - but it can be recorded in the proxy [which is how] it’s like a wiretap implant.”
“I turned it on next to their radio and then dialled myself,” Ruiu says of the demonstration held deep below the Tokyo conference to avoid pwning delegate phones. “And instead of ringing on my phone it rang on theirs.”
Stay tuned for more info on the “man-in-the-middle”
