Hi Karsten, all,
On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:50:54 +0100 Karsten Nohl nohl@virginia.edu wrote:
My question is, is this MSC number, visible from the mobile phone side? If yes, somebody could actually wardrive, to get the MSC number-to-location mapping? Can airprobe, or OpenBTS help?
Creating the {MSC -> location} mapping database would be a very worthwhile exercise. The data collection would have to happen from phones. Either we create an application for one of the popular phone platforms (Symbian, Android, iPhone). Anybody on the list knows if these phones expose the MSC number to application software?
Yes, the answer is: No. The phone does not know about this.
It would have to be a service that incorporates a user or mobile phone software based part that knows about the location and a network based part that can perform a SMS routing request. Both of these would have to be correlated.
The implementation of this in a way that honors privacy as well as security is left as an exercise to the reader.
This is most certainly not a task within the scope of osmocom-bb.
cheers, nibbler
p.s. the relevant cell specific information that is known to the phone can be found in the first seven fields e.g. here: http://www.nobbi.com/btsdb.php?netw=all&type=c&search=__L447L