Unapproved Cellular Device Presence

Unapproved Cellular Device Presence (2G GSM, 3G WCDMA, 4G LTE, 5G) poses a serious threat to your organization’s security. It’s one thing to have a “no cell phones in this area” policy. It’s another thing to detect policy violations. To learn more about sensing the unapproved cellular devices operating in your environment read our Bastille data sheets or request a Bastille demo.

Key Takeaways

• Some areas, such as trading floors, prohibit cell phones to prevent out-of-band leakage of sensitive data
• Detecting covert cellular use means monitoring the many uplink frequencies and protocols phones use
• GSM, 3G, and LTE all operate differently, making comprehensive cellular detection a hard problem
• Bastille detects the energy from a phone, even toggling airplane mode, and flags a policy violation to the right people

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. My name is Balint Seeber, and I'm the director of vulnerability research at Bastille. I'd like to talk to you about cellular presence and detection of cellular energy, detection of phone calls, detection of cellular data when people are actually using their device. And specifically, in the context of the enterprise environment, where cell phones are not allowed in some particular area.

This can be common, say, on a trading floor, where you need people concentrating on the transactions, the sensitive data exchanges, and not being able to relay any of this information out of band to another party. So the threat there is, people can somehow covertly use their cell phone or other devices that use the cellular networks to exfiltrate data. And you want to be able to detect when that actually happens.

The way to do this is that you need to look at the cellular bands, and detect the appropriate uplink frequencies that cells might talk on or listen on from these phones, and then have infrastructure in place to monitor them, which is what the Bastille solution actually does. This is not an easy problem, because there are a lot of different frequencies and a lot of different protocols, there's GSM, 3G, LTE. And they all operate slightly differently. It's a challenge to actually look at all of them.

But we've been working quite hard at understanding all the protocols. And we have implemented them in our solution, such that, if you open your phone and you immediately start browsing, or even go in and out of airplane mode, the system will detect the energy coming from your cell phone, and will very clearly show a policy violation on the console that will alert the relevant people within your organization. Thanks very much for listening. If you'd like to learn more, please visit our website. [MUSIC PLAYING] PLAYING]