Washington, D.C. hacker convention ShmooCon wrapped up last Sunday after three days of, as organizers put it, “technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical InfoSec issues.”
Brandon Creighton, hacker and researcher at Veracode, recently built a GSM-based phone network at annual Las Vegas hacker conference DEF CON and made an impression again at ShmooCon with his latest innovation: a less sophisticated 1G phone network that would allow users to make free wireless calls in a limited area. It likely won’t work outside of your neighborhood, but it provides an alternative to GSM, which is currently used by AT&T. The cell network will also require that you use an older phone — the kind shaped remarkably like a brick.
Creighton’s success is due in part to the fact that most cell phones operate on 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, allowing a lot of bandwidth for 1G carriers. 1G is the original, which means that it only works on phones that predate some of the people using them.
No stranger to the brick phone, Creighton presented a panel entitled “Dig Out Your Brick Phone! Bringing AMPS Back with GNU Radio” at this year’s ShmooCon. The site describes it as “a talk on the design and implementation of gr-amps, a set of GNU Radio blocks that can turn a TX-capable software-defined radio into a base station for AMPS devices — including that brick phone in your basement.”
To build your own cellular network, visit GitHub, where you can download Creighton’s code. Next, build a software-defined radio responsible for doing the work of a cellphone tower — it should run you about $400. Of course, you’ll need to know something about telecom and be willing to experiment, but conceivably, you’ll now be able to make a functioning network.
Source: Hackaday
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