GSM threats mitigation for Military Forces at Sea

May 11^th 2021

Government and military forces around the globe that make use of ubiquitous civil GSM networks are being jeopardized when sailing from port to port with fraudulent cell towers able to intercept and spoof messages and calls, so personnel privacy and mission operations can be compromised. This kind of events typically occurs in frontiers between countries or strategic areas, where hacking activities are intense over one of the most accessible devices, soldier's cellphones/smartphones.

Spanish Troops at the sea testing

In the RESISTO project (http://www.resistoproject.eu/) funded by the European Commission, Integrasys has developed a tool named RANMONITOR for fraudulent cell towers detection that has been recently tested satisfactorily in the Spanish Navy MARSEC21 exercise. A fraudulent cell installed aboard the OPV Infanta Cristina was successfully detected by RANMONITOR, identifying the threat and properly differentiating it from the rest of the legitimate cell stations deployed on the close coast. With such capability, it is possible to make sure that own forces´ mobile phones do not connect to the pirate station, minimizing attack possibilities. If any cellular phone connects to such an illegitimate station, Integrasys tools can record all of the signaling, calls and messages exchanged for further analysis. One of the most interesting key factors of this exercise is to match end-user needs with software tools providers to understand better government needs firsthand and customize such a solution to each end-user processes and operations.

Integrasys is a telecommunication tool provider for improving the availability, resiliency, and performance in terrestrial and satellite networks, and with the work on RESISTO project has proven to develop tools that make government networks more secure and resilient with easy-to-use interfaces for forces operating in the field. RANMONITOR product is designed to protect not only 2G, but also 3G/4G and future 5G, in both fixed and mobility scenarios as demonstrated in MARSEC. These solutions will help governments around the globe to be less compromised and more secure in mitigating hacking on soldier smartphones.