Your Phone Is Wide Open

How we’ve surrendered privacy for the sake of distraction

Image credit: Buzzfeed

Thanks to our desire to ensure every waking moment can be filled with mindless distraction, most people in the West now spend an astonishing five hours per day staring at the shiny screens of their phones. While a tiny fraction of this time is consumed with actual communication with other humans and an even more miniscule fraction is dedicated to complying with corporate two-factor authentication requirements, the vast majority of the the daily five hours is spent gawping at TikTok and other equally intellect-crippling ways to turn one’s brain into insensate mush. The consequence of our phone addiction is that our phones are always on and thus always connected to the network. Being always connected to a network means that malign actors have no difficulty whatsoever in turning our phones into the perfect way to know where we are and what we are doing.

There are several reasons why our phones are so vulnerable to being converted into spy-in-your-hand devices but the most glaring hole in our cellular infrastructure comes from the way in which call control is implemented. Everything going into your phone and coming out of it via the cellular network is controlled by a signaling system developed back in the 1960s at a time when cellular phones didn’t exist and security wasn’t even a concept any network provider would have imagined necessary. This signaling system was called SS7 (imaginatively this stands for Signaling System 7) and operates on a separate channel from the voice channel (which back in those days was the only form of human-to-human communiation, long before text messaging was conceived). SS7 is invisible to consumers, being used to set up and tear down connections in the background.

But SS7 is important regardless of the fact few people are aware of its existence. It’s important because it has precisely nothing in the way of security. Anyone with access to any of the thousands of network operators anywhere in the world can utilize SS7 to perform clandestine operations on any device using the SS7 protocol (e.g. every single cellular phone in existence).

Back in the days when SS7 was developed, networks were controlled either directly by government organizations such as British Telecom and France Telecom…