Cell phone hackers can track your physical location without your knowledge

Using a cheap phone, readily available equipment, and no direct help from a service provider, hackers could listen to unencrypted broadcast messages from cell phone towers. MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (02/16/2012) —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. "Cell phone towers have to track cell phone subscribers to provide service efficiently," Foo Kune explained. "For example, an incoming voice call requires the network to locate that device so it can allocate the appropriate resources to handle the call. Your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions in order to make it easy to find it." The result is that the tower will broadcast a page to your phone, waiting for your phone to respond when you get a call, Foo Kune said.