Karsten Nohl - I hacked SIM cards with a single text - and the networks DON'T CARE
Karsten Nohl, the security researcher who broke into SIM cards with a single text, has told The Register he is dismayed by the mobile industry's lukewarm response to his revelations - and has revealed, for the first time, exactly how he did it.
Nohl thought exposing the flaws in SIM security would force the telcos to fix them. Theoretically, the two flaws would have worked in tandem to intercept calls and threaten the security of wireless NFC applications - such as pay-by-wave and other contactless payments.
The German expert now claims that the most serious of the two flaws has been deliberately ignored by an industry that wants to, allegedly, keep the backdoor ajar so that it can silently roll out software updates to handsets... a gaping access route that may not be closed until it's too late. Nohl discovered he could infiltrate SIM cards by sending specially formatted SMS messages, and found a flaw that would enable him to break out from the cards' inbuilt security sandbox. Yet he was astonished to discover that despite publicly announcing patches and giving every impression of caring, the industry had – according to Nohl – actually done nothing to fix the problems.
