Your Cell Can Tell Burglars When You Are Away... and More

Cellular networks leak the locations of cell phone users, allowing a third party to easily track the location of the cell phone user without the user's knowledge, according to new research by computer scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering.

University of Minnesota computer science Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune, working with associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim, and undergraduate student John Koelndorfer, described their work in a recently released paper "Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface" which was presented at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California...

"It has a low entry barrier," Foo Kune said. "Being attainable through open source projects running on commodity software."

Using an inexpensive phone and open source software, the researchers were able to track the location of cell phone users without their knowledge on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, the predominant worldwide network. (more)