Camp++ YouTube Talk: GSM Signal Sniffing for Everyone with GR-GSM and Multi-RTL

Over on YouTube the channel Budapest Hackerspace has recently uploaded a talk by Piotr Krysik which was given during the August 2016 Camp++ 0x7e0 information security conference. The talk is titled: “GSM signal sniffing for everyone with gr-gsm and Multi-RTL by Piotr Krysik” and talks about using the gr-gsm software and RTL-SDR dongles to sniff the GSM mobile phone network. Also, a tool developed by Piotr called multi-rtl which allows the proper synchronization of multiple RTL-SDR dongles in order to cover the large gap between the GSM uplink and downlink frequencies is discussed.

The talk explains a bit about how GSM works, and then goes on to talk about the gr-gsm and multi-rtl software. The talk blurb reads:

Gr-gsm is a set of tools for receiving GSM transmissions, which works with any software radio hardware capable of receiving GSM signal. Together with widely available RTL2832 based TV dongles, that are popularly used as low cost software radio receivers (known as RTL-SDR), it enables everyone to receive and study protocols used in GSM’s mobile radio interface.

Ability to receive signals spread over wide frequency range exceeding single RTL-SDR receiver’s bandwidth (~2.4MHz) was available exclusively for the owners of more capable and more expensive SDR devices. With introduction of Multi-RTL project by the author of the talk, this limit was overcome through synchronization of multiple RTL-SDR receivers in time domain, that doesn’t require complicated hardware modifications. With Muli-RTL it is possible to receive for example uplink and downlink of GSM900 transmissions, that are separated by 45MHz.

Speaker will present origins of both of the projects, together with description of their inner workings, examples of applications and plans for the future.

The talk slides can be downloaded here.