A photo from open sources
Researchers from Germany have developed a completely secretive a method for tracking unique digital fingerprints of any cell phone. Often enough, those who do not want their tracked down, change the SIM card of the phone or fabricate a fake IMEI, to trick law enforcement. However in the future it is may become impossible: a technique developed by a German scientist Jacob Hasse and his colleagues from the Technical University of Dresden, allows you to identify phones in GSM networks, even if their tracks try to hide.
The fact is that although telephones are mass produced and in each of them the same filling is installed, there are extremely small differences in the patterns of the radio signals that they emit. These tiny immutable differences sent to communication towers, unique enough to identify and track any telephone.
This summer at ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security “scientists were able to recognize and accurately identify 13 mobile phones showing success rate at 97.62 percent. “Among them were four identical and almost nine identical phones, which proves – selected features are unique to each device, “tell researchers. “Also by interacting with the GSM interface on physical layer, you can track mobile phones without contact with them and absolutely not attracting their attention users. ”
As Hasse himself says: “Our method does not send any data on a mobile phone. It works completely passively and just listens for outgoing phone signals – it’s impossible to track. ”
According to a statement from Digital’s research team Evidence “from Dresden,” Such Phone Identification May used for user verification, for tracking devices (including stolen), and for the needs of law enforcement in whole. While existing active identification techniques require support from a mobile provider or a working base station for organizing the so-called “IMSI-traps”, the new passive method relies entirely on observing emitted signals. Future possibilities of applying this method, in addition to identifying phones, may also include detection fake base stations. ”
