🛡️ CELLULAR ATTACK VECTORS

Red Team Telecom Threat Matrix

Mapping telecommunications cellular attack surfaces, rogue base stations, silent SMS paging vectors, and baseband vulnerabilities against TelcoSec defensive diagnostics.

ATTACK VECTOR 01

False Base Stations (IMSI-Catchers / Stingrays)

Rogue cellular transceivers broadcasting deceptive System Information Blocks (SIB1/SIB2) forcing handsets to downgrade from 5G/LTE to 2G/GSM or unencrypted null ciphers (A5/0 or NEA0).

TelcoSec Guard Mitigation: Real-time RRC Connection Reconfiguration inspector, Timing Advance anomaly scoring, and instant cipher downgrade isolation.

ATTACK VECTOR 02

Silent SMS (Type-0 PDU Location Probes)

Zero-display Short Messages sent by surveillance platforms to elicit baseband acknowledgments without alerting the user UI, extracting real-time cell site telemetry.

TelcoSec Guard Mitigation: Telephony framework PDU interceptor that catches Type-0 headers before suppression, alerting the user with timestamp and origin MSISDN.

ATTACK VECTOR 03

SIM Application Toolkit (STK) Exploitation

Malicious Over-The-Air (OTA) SMS-PP payloads executing unauthorized proactive commands or exfiltrating SIM hardware cryptographic keys via Bearer Independent Protocol (BIP).

TelcoSec SIM Vault Mitigation: Complete STK proactive command sandbox, BIP channel filter, and GSMA SGP.22 eSIM cryptographic profile audit log.

ATTACK VECTOR 04

SS7, Diameter & Core Network Interception

Inter-operator roaming attacks, MAP/CAP location queries, SMS-C intercept vectors, and GTP-U tunnel decapsulation compromising user calls and 2FA data in transit.

TelcoSec Defense Architecture: Carrier-grade signaling audit rules and encrypted application-layer tunneling verified against rogue HLR/HSS queries.