I have been implementing various ETSI/3GPP specifications for more than a decade. At GMIT we provided implementation feedback for DVB-H and OMA BCAST. With the Osmocom project and Sysmocom I have several years of implementing GSM (and UTRAN) specifications on my back.

In general GSM is a great engineering project. It lead to the creation of the ETSI, they adopted the English language for their specifications and they applied the information hiding principle. The group speciale mobile managed to create well described components that communicate through fully specified interfaces. Somebody implementing a SIM card does not need to know about a VLR. Somebody implementing a VLR does not need to know about the AuC. Somebody implementing a BTS doesn’t need to know about the MSC.

This summer and in December severe privacy issues on ETSI/3GPP MAP have been revealed. At the 31C3 there will be two in-depth talks about different aspects of it and some of the issues have given us a nice laugh, some the OMG feeling, some gave us pity but I am a software engineer so the question is how did we end up in this situation? ETSI/3GPP MAP was designed at the time SS7 was a walled garden and when it came to telephony one nation could trust another. This trust model fell apart with the liberation of the telephony industry but the specification was not updated. ETSI/3GPP MAP went through several phases and they have had some really bad design choices that are thankfully (or thanks to capitalism) ceased out from the network. All of the issues found and disclosed appear to be bugs in the specification and not a specific implementation. ETSI/3GPP MAP is an old protocol and while one could improve the specification to fix the protocol it is unlikely that new implementations would be rolled out.

But there is hope, there is a new protocol. The protocol was designed in a world where IP was well understood. We had big security issues, viruses, worms, targeted attacks. The basic trust model had changed to a world where one needs to protect oneself. The protocol is called DIAMETER and will power true 4G networks. It is based on the well known RADIUS protocol that many people may know from eduroam.

So do we just need to wait until most networks deploy 4G and we will be more secure against privacy disclosure and other attacks? 3GPP has even created interworking between MAP and DIAMETER. This is done by mapping one or more MAP operations to calls to DIAMETER. Wait what? How can this be possible? It is possible because the fundamental design and trust model is the same. If you tell a HLR/HSS that a subscriber is in your network then they will believe it. While RADIUS was verifying credentials in the home server, in DIAMETER it is not part of what a HSS has to do. This means a subscriber can be still be hijacked.

My understanding of DIAMETER is still very small but it is quite clear that the protocol and mindset is bug-compatible and only the encoding and number of messages has changed.

So where does it leave us? And what should we do?

• We should have the “public” attend 3GPP meetings to push for better specifications.
• We should try to stop the DIAMETER roll-out before we have an insecure legacy system long before the old one has been ceased out.
• We need to push for mobile stacks that only implement L1 and have Free Software that implements the protocol (who wants to have a SIP, UDP and IPsec stack in a proprietary baseband processor?)
• We need strong End-to-End encryption. But for that we need to be able to control more of the telephony part. Make it possible to run SIP over TLS servers that can interconnect with each other. Make sure that your Network Operator just gives you IP and you handle your telephony yourself.
• We need to push for protocol design that limits and reduces the overhead around the IP header.
• We need interest groups and funding that make that possible.