One of the most exciting talks at Def Con Safe Mode 28, for me anyway, was Cooper Quintin discussing the EFF project “Crocodile Hunter,” an SDR app that helps to discover rogue cell stations.
As some of you are aware, I spent quite a bit of time two years ago trying to get a working platform for observing 4G behavior. I had a great SDR for it, the BladeRF X40, but I never managed to get a system completely up and running.
With this release, we’ve been given a predictable, stable, working platform for 4G experimentation. The hardest part for entry-level experimenters such as myself has been automated.
My platform:
Ubuntu 20 LTS
BladeRF X40
(2) LTE paddle antennas from Amazon ($10-15)
An HP All-In-One gen 1 PC.
All that’s really required is reasonable processing power, and optimally USB 3.0. It should even run on a Raspberry Pi 4, which is wicked convenient for mobile cell tower mapping.
Caveats:
Make sure you have the 2019 BladeRF libraries, if that’s the device you use.
If you run into any problems compiling, check the issues page on the github page for the project. I ran into a couple and was able to resolve them pretty quickly.
Also, per Cooper, there’s a bug in the initial job to fetch the EARFCN list. I had to populate my config.ini manually.