From what I've heard (I may be mistaken here), 2G/3G had pretty poor radio link security. This resulted, of course, in Stingrays. 4G supposedly has actually se

From what I've heard (I may be mistaken here), 2G/3G had pretty poor radio link security. This resulted, of course, in Stingrays. 4G supposedly has actually secure radio links; I think to the extent Stingrays work on these devices, it's by forcing a downgrade to 2G/3G. So as it becomes feasible to drop 2G/3G support Stingrays will stop working, although of course this will take a long time. That said, supposedly what encryption 2G/3G did use extended further into the core network, whereas the encryption that 4G uses terminates at the base station. Supposedly all providers which are implementing 4G are in practice encrypting the links from the base station to the rest of the network with IPsec, but this does mean that the traffic is unencrypted at the base station itself, which makes the base station vulnerable to physical compromise. Some people have criticised LTE's security over GSM/UMTS for this reason. On the whole I think it's a net gain, though. Physically compromising a base station is a higher friction and higher risk activity than deployment of a Stingray. Moreover, I can understand that it would be potentially troublesome to have an encrypted channel from the handset to deep in an operator's core network, since it forces all traffic to travel via that route, which would necessarily increase latency. Although in practice IIRC 4G traffic might still take the same route anyway due to the weird tunnelling architecture GSM/UMTS/LTE uses, so that might be a moot point. But the article seems to imply they're focusing on reducing latency, so it's possible they're changing that for 5G. Anyone know?