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Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side. The military has been doing electronic warfare for ages but it's o
by AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side. The military has been doing electronic warfare for ages but it's only now popping up in the consumer industry.
An example: all wireless protocols can be trivially jammed by just spamming noise, like anything else, but most can also be smart jammed by various methods: spamming disconnect packets, malformed packets that crash the device, noise jamming very specific parts of various transactions, like the alignment section of OFDM QAM on 4/5G, etc. This means, instead of needing some multiple of the targets transmit power to cover a wide area, you can use as much or less power than the target which is extremely bad from an EW standpoint.
We need to build smarter wireless protocols that can both resist casual assholes, but also higher sophistication adversaries up to and probably including nation state actors for the safety of our infrastructure.
And yes, that means insulin pumps probably shouldn't have radios in them.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoPeople don’t do it because it’s a quick way to land in hot water with the FCC. You don’t want federal crimes because you jammed someone’s wifi
- lazide 3y agoHuh? Breaking into someone’s house is already a felony pretty much everywhere. I think it’s more likely just a bit harder to find a known good RF jammer than a rock. And a rock was usually fine. Or used to be, anyway.
- sidewndr46 3y agoFacebook tries to sell me RF jammers pretty much nonstop. Aliexpress sellers will happilly mail you whatever RF jammer you want.
- sidewndr46 3y agoJamming 2.4 GHz spectrum is unlikely to ever warrant an FCC response. Virtually every microwave I've tested is an excellent jammer for 2.4 GHz. It even has a user interface for how long like you'd like to jam communications! I'm legally allowed to "jam" your WiFi so long as I am using the spectrum for communications because I am licensed user unlike the majority of 2.4 GHz users. Even if you file an FCC complaint they aren't going to do anything. Now if you move up to 5+ GHz range it really depends. If you start jamming the DFS bands it'll eventually get noticed.
- yardie 3y agoUnless it's a very old microwave it should not be leaking RF into the surroundings because that RF is energy targeted at warming up food and liquids.
- sidewndr46 3y agoI bought my microwave in 2014. It was top of the line. I warm up a cup of water and I can watch every 2.4 GHz device drop off from my AP for that time period.
- leptons 3y agoYou have a defective microwave, you may want to get that checked out.
- kjs3 3y agothat RF is energy targeted at warming up food and liquids. By pumping microwave energy into the water molecules. At around 2.45GHz[1]. So it doesn't take much drift and crappy shielding to crap all over adjacent spectra. This is extremely well documented and "they should build better microwaves" hasn't reached give-a-shit level for most of the world. [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/39/1/006 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/39/1/00...
- pixl97 3y agoHell, one of my customers had one of the best 2.4GHz jammers I'd ever seen at their house. It was one of those portable handsets for hardwired phones that were still common in the 2000s before everyone started ditching land lines. They had lots of complaints about the quality of wireless they had in their house. I dropped in more access points even after everything worked perfectly when I was there. Then they got a call when I was there and everything stopped working. This was before 5GHz was really common, but B/G/N would just stop functioning.
- kjs3 3y ago
- Aaronstotle 3y agoHow is the FCC going to know I jammed my neighbors wifi? This is a serious question, you can practically run any red light you want where I live without any repercussions. Is there an FCC overlord watching these signals?
- ronnier 3y agoThis is taken a lot more serious than running red lights, and yes, they will get you. A guy in Florida was using a jammer in his car to block phones when he was driving. They found it. https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cell-signals-while-driving https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cel...
- sidewndr46 3y agoThat guy was not jamming WiFi Also he ran the jammer every day along a very specific route. It's like robbing the same liquor store 3 nights in a row. Eventually even the laziest cop just waits around back for you to show up.
- rolph 3y agohttps://www.fcc.gov/over-air-spectrum-observation-capabilities https://www.fcc.gov/over-air-spectrum-observation-capabiliti... https://www.mdarc.org/regulations/fcc-monitoring-stations https://www.mdarc.org/regulations/fcc-monitoring-stations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcKCMfVJohI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcKCMfVJohI
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoThose are all either offline or too far from anyone to be able to detect, let alone triangulate, a wifi jammer.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoTwo ways First way, they get reports from people/companies/band users and will maybe act on them. This assumes it's in a band they care about, people report stuff in the ham bands all the time but they nearly universally ignore those. Second way, you interfere with something safety critical, such as an airport, where they may have installed equipment to monitor RF in particular bands. TL;DR: unless your neighbor is an RF professional and can determine that they are being interfered with instead of "huh, the wifis no workie...shrug", they just won't do anything.
- RobRivera 3y agoFCC fines for jamming the spectrum are...nontrivial
- beardyw 3y agoI think it can be done by sending de-authenticates. No signal jamming required.
- lazide 3y agoFCC rules forbid hostile use of the frequencies, that’s also what forbids jamming. Everyone is supposed to get along and play nicely, and jamming is the definition of not doing that. Intentionally sending disconnects/de-authentications too, if the intent is denying lawful use for someone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ttyprintk 3y agoThe FCC uses the word “blocking” and institutes the same fine.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoI can assure you they don't give a shit. The FCC has been completely asleep at the wheel for a decade. Yeah if you rig up a 1kw tube amp and start splattering a big chunk of the FM boardcast band, jam their cash cow mobile networks or run around with a GPS jammer near an airport you'll get a near immediate PP slap but beyond that they'll maybe send a car eventually. They don't have the ability to detect and locate this stuff in real time and, IMO, probably shouldn't for privacy reasons.
- pierat 3y agoFor ISM, yeah the FCC don't give a shit. Marriott was jamming for years, until they were forced to stop. Keyword: years. If someone is making temporary jamming attacks (even on GPS or cell), unless you do it at your house or stationary, you ain't getting caught. I know 'a friend at the hackerspace' who did a .25w GPS spoof to make the city look like it was in Moscow, Russia. Nobody responded.
- traceroute66 3y ago> Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side. Not really, it is, but nobody gives a shit. Before zero-trust was the latest cool buzzword on the block, there was the Jericho Forum[1]. I vividly recall attending a Jericho affiliated event where one speaker was banging on about how insecure those bluetooth phone dongles were. Nothing changes. Security remains an afterthought. But back to the topic at hand, security camera, home WiFi, asking for trouble really. There are some things for which you really should just run a damn cable. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_Forum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_Forum
- kjkjadksj 3y agoWhy do you think there are so few attacks given the wide surface and long known vulnerabilities here? Maybe there are simply even lower hanging fruit to further your scam or espionage than intercepting these communications?
- bri3d 3y agoBarrier to entry, mostly. Implementation of most RF attacks historically required expensive SDR equipment and strong knowledge in a highly specialized domain. Even many WiFi attacks which can be executed by off-the-shelf WiFi hardware require specialized driver/firmware hacking to execute, since most WiFi firmware isn't designed to send frames "out of turn" or with the wrong flags set. This is all evolving rapidly and I fully expect this to be one of the hottest topics in coming years. Flipper Zero is an obvious example of the change here - it was absolutely nothing new hardware or software wise, but providing easy access to standard BLE primitives and years-old sub-Ghz radio chipsets triggered a variety of meltdowns. More powerful SDRs and basic "building block" libraries for SDR are only becoming cheaper and more available every day.
- autoexec 3y agoI suspect that there are many many attacks, but we don't hear much about them because they go undetected. People are routinely being tracked via bluetooth for example but very few people think about it or bother to disable bluetooth because of it. Companies (and anyone else interested) just get to scoop up all that data and use it for whatever they feel like.
- teeray 3y agoWe need to start wiring houses for this stuff. It's absurd that we don't treat data cabling as fundamental as plumbing at this point.
- jimt1234 3y agoI'm unsure, but my gut tells me there's regulations/building codes that require landline cabling in (new) residential homes, and of course, not data cabling. Like I said, it's just a hunch, though.
- sidewndr46 3y agoYou're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling. I'm not even sure how this would be phrased. Especially given that phone cabling is just Cat5 cable now. Data cabling is omitted from new builds because it doesn't sell homes and is just a cost. The only recent comparison I can think of is how some cities actually required lead pipes for drinking water for decades.
- autoexec 3y ago> You're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling I don't think so. I think he's suggesting that without a code that does require it nobody is going to bother including it even though they really should.
- brewtide 3y agoWorked for a res-electrician for about 6 years. We would often strongly suggest that people run cat5e (it was years back now) to many locations for future proofing layouts and connections in the house. Very very few people had interest in the slight added expense of the cable and labor to do as such -- all insisting that they only needed it to / from cable modem area to their aspirational wifi router location.
- 3y ago
- neilalexander 3y ago> but most can also be smart jammed by various methods: spamming disconnect packets At the very least for this particular case, WPA3 mandates Protected Management Frames (PMF) to prevent de-auth attacks on Wi-Fi networks.
- ttyprintk 3y agoIt’ll be called 802.11w deeper in the options. Be sure to test your gear during configuration.
- samstave 3y agoI have a devious idea: A device that looks like solar-powered garden lights, but it has a wifi jammer built inside, and you plant them outside businesses such as banks, in the perimeter of their buildings (banks usually have large setbacks and include huge planter boxes (as bollards - see fed reserve SF that had to remodel the planter boxes because OWS folks were camping in them) to keep vehicles from ramming through doors But "jamming-bombs" might be really interesting. Is it illegal to spam noise on any frequency? Whats required? the SSID youre attempting to jam? If so, just scan for networks and pick one... then spam it with auth requests with a rotating table of MAC addresses/IMEIs etc...
- kjs3 3y agoI can't speak for all banks, but while our branches have Wifi (sure...you need to carry around an iPad...fine) the customer critical systems are wired for this reason. There's also WiFi monitors and 'wireless IDS' systems and pretty smart techs that know to look for stuff like that (because your devious idea is not remotely new to us). And if we think someone is pulling a stunt like that, we can call the FCC direct, and when we do, they do care, and they bring pretty impressive tech when they show up. Sometimes, as I understand it, with the FBI in tow.
- samstave 3y agorogue ap detection has been around for a long time. you make the jammer hop between all the plants randomly. (its just a stupid video game mechanic and fun to think of RF/IR grenades. (have micro RF 'jammers' that are the size of peas (they just emit enough RF noise to the local APs - - and throw a handfull in an area so RSSI RTLS is moot for the main jammers.... (more of a comic cyber - Ronin type comic that happens in a retro future Tokyo) https://i.imgur.com/jBc4jtv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jBc4jtv.jpg
- kjs3 3y agoSorry. I thought you were talking about something more nuanced than being a low-grade dick. Sure, you can probably drive the secops guys nuts for a while, and definitely piss off the customer service folks, which pisses of customers. But no one is going not be able to deposit their check or get some $$$ out of the ATM machine.