* Posts by woody1

1 publicly visible post • joined 1 Aug 2012

Tracking Android phones is easy, says researcher

woody1

Re: The original article specifically mentions Android devices

Sorry, but I don't think you know what you're talking about. Sounds to me like the type of attack the author is discussing involves an external site intercepting communications between the phone and and an A-GPS server, then spoofing the phone with a "man-in-the-middle" attack. This has nothing to do with the code running on the GPS chip or the CPU. It has to do with the way A-GPS is designed.

I don't quite understand how this could work, though. My Android phone has a hard-coded A-GPS server: supl.google.com to be exact. I would assume that the phone looks up this address through DNS, then resolves the address to the correct IP address. So it sounds like the attacker could intercept the initial DNS lookup and redirect to another IP address. This would allow the attacker to monitor the transactions for a while.

What I'm not understanding, though, is how this would provide ongoing interception. Seems that once the GPS function or the phone was turned off, the next time GPS was used, the phone would go and do a new DNS lookup and then fetch the correct IP. In fact, it's possible that it does the DNS lookup every time the initial DNS lookup expires. So, without some more detail, I don't know how significant this threat might be.