The reason why you see paging by IMSI in real-world GSM networks

This is merely a historical archive of years 2008-2021, before the migration to mailman3.

A maintained and still updated list archive can be found at https://lists.osmocom.org/hyperkitty/list/OpenBSC@lists.osmocom.org/.

loay abdelrazek loay.razek at gmail.com
Tue May 22 15:37:10 UTC 2018


Thanks Neels, that was informative

On Tuesday, 22 May 2018, Neels Hofmeyr <nhofmeyr at sysmocom.de> wrote:

> On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 05:14:41AM -0400, loay abdelrazek wrote:
> > Hi Harald
> >
> > Yes yes I totally understand , so what could be the cases for sending the
> > IMSI and what would be the possible remediation for such thing
>
> It sounds like you actually don't "totally" understand and are asking for
> a 101
> on IMSI and TMSI?
>
> The subscriber is identified to the network by its IMSI, which stays
> constant.
>
> A new TMSI is given on every Location Update, meaning it changes all the
> time,
> which is good for privacy. The network does its best to remember the last
> TMSI
> the phone has been given.
>
> But before the network can know who that subscriber is, things have to
> start
> out with the IMSI. That's normally when the phone asks for a Location
> Update
> for the first time. Usually the new TMSI is sent to the phone ciphered, so
> that
> the IMSI <-> TMSI mapping is essentially secret.
>
> A TMSI is short-lived and an MSC may decide not to store IMSI<->TMSI
> mappings
> forever, for various/unknown reasons. So as soon as there is no TMSI left
> in
> the MSC's subscriber state, the only way to page is by IMSI.
>
> Also, the phone may have forgotten its TMSI, e.g. after roaming to a
> different
> network.
>
> But: AFAICT, under "proper" operations, a subscriber should have a TMSI
> after a
> Location Update, and either detach when it leaves or be implicitly
> detached by
> timeout. So as long as it is Page-able by the MSC, it should have a TMSI as
> well. In other words, the MSC should either have a TMSI to page for, or the
> subscriber's state should be "not attached", i.e. can't page anyway. Bottom
> line, whenever paging goes out by IMSI, the MSC has actively decided to not
> bother about privacy (by implementation, config or by licensing details).
>
> IIRC, the only way to get an IMSI paging out of osmo-msc is to globally
> switch
> off TMSI allocation.
>
> ~N
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/openbsc/attachments/20180522/bee0b0bd/attachment.htm>


More information about the OpenBSC mailing list