Hello! Today I will tell you about a very important aspect of security for a fucking elephant species — this is flashing SIM card.
What is SIM Card flashing?
There were and still are many legends about flashing the SIM card. Some of these legends have nothing to do with the flashing itself. Flashing, or cloning, a SIM card is actually not a difficult process, but it requires a lot of material costs, straight hands, a bright head and a lot of free time. Very often I have heard stories about how people created an image of a SIM card, having in their hands only sets of PIN and PUK codes from this very SIM card, and then using an RS-232 cable they easily flashed it in the phone itself. This is nonsense. At the moment, I do not know anyone who could reflash the SIM card remotely, and I probably will never find out.
Also mentioned was the SIMEdit program, which can "absolutely" do anything, which turned out to be a regular phone book editor, although not free. You can find out the same 128-bit SIM card key only with the help of a powerful cryptanalyzer (the cost of which is exorbitant for the average user), and not less than 10 hours. There is one more "but": during these ten, and maybe even more hours, there is a strong load on the SIM, and some copies of cards can not withstand this and burn out.
The hot spring of forty-five...
In other words, you need to have a friend's SIM card with you for at least half a day, which must survive, because it still has to work. But such nuances did not stop phreakers, but rather inspired them. They found SIM cards, made images of them, and threw out hundreds of burned ones. Phone hackers were not deterred even by the fact that you can only make calls from a reflashed card, and not receive them. At that time, a minute was very expensive by today's standards, and this business was worth it.
Hacking sim cards is easy?
In May 2002, the Russian media published a statement that IBM specialists were able to crack the SIM card code using only publicly available electronic devices in a few minutes. That is, any Uncle Vasya, whom I mentioned earlier, can use one soldering iron to crack SIM cards in five minutes. Naturally, no one liked this scenario. Immediately after this phenomenal discovery (not a fact, by the way, that it was a discovery – we were also not fools), using the technology proposed by IBM, an auxiliary randomly generated code matrix was added to the code matrix, which increased the protection of the SIM card by an order of magnitude and covered the detected hole. By this time, phreaking had gradually become obsolete.
With phones of the DAMPS, AMPS, etc. standard, things were much easier. Information about the SIM card is stored in their non-volatile phone memory – eeprom. To make a "double" of such a phone, you just need to change the IMEI, which, by the way, is not encrypted in any way.
What is SIM Card flashing?
There were and still are many legends about flashing the SIM card. Some of these legends have nothing to do with the flashing itself. Flashing, or cloning, a SIM card is actually not a difficult process, but it requires a lot of material costs, straight hands, a bright head and a lot of free time. Very often I have heard stories about how people created an image of a SIM card, having in their hands only sets of PIN and PUK codes from this very SIM card, and then using an RS-232 cable they easily flashed it in the phone itself. This is nonsense. At the moment, I do not know anyone who could reflash the SIM card remotely, and I probably will never find out.
Also mentioned was the SIMEdit program, which can "absolutely" do anything, which turned out to be a regular phone book editor, although not free. You can find out the same 128-bit SIM card key only with the help of a powerful cryptanalyzer (the cost of which is exorbitant for the average user), and not less than 10 hours. There is one more "but": during these ten, and maybe even more hours, there is a strong load on the SIM, and some copies of cards can not withstand this and burn out.
The hot spring of forty-five...
In other words, you need to have a friend's SIM card with you for at least half a day, which must survive, because it still has to work. But such nuances did not stop phreakers, but rather inspired them. They found SIM cards, made images of them, and threw out hundreds of burned ones. Phone hackers were not deterred even by the fact that you can only make calls from a reflashed card, and not receive them. At that time, a minute was very expensive by today's standards, and this business was worth it.
Hacking sim cards is easy?
In May 2002, the Russian media published a statement that IBM specialists were able to crack the SIM card code using only publicly available electronic devices in a few minutes. That is, any Uncle Vasya, whom I mentioned earlier, can use one soldering iron to crack SIM cards in five minutes. Naturally, no one liked this scenario. Immediately after this phenomenal discovery (not a fact, by the way, that it was a discovery – we were also not fools), using the technology proposed by IBM, an auxiliary randomly generated code matrix was added to the code matrix, which increased the protection of the SIM card by an order of magnitude and covered the detected hole. By this time, phreaking had gradually become obsolete.
With phones of the DAMPS, AMPS, etc. standard, things were much easier. Information about the SIM card is stored in their non-volatile phone memory – eeprom. To make a "double" of such a phone, you just need to change the IMEI, which, by the way, is not encrypted in any way.
