LTrack: Stealthy Tracking of Mobile Phones in LTE

We introduce LTrack, a new tracking attack on LTE that allows an attacker to stealthily extract user devices’ locations and permanent identifiers (IMSI). To remain stealthy, the localization of devices in LTrack is fully passive, relying on our new uplink/downlink sniffer. Our sniffer records both the times of arrival of LTE messages and the contents of the Timing Advance Commands, based on which LTrack calculates locations. LTrack is the first to show the feasibility of a passive localization in LTE through implementation on software-defined radio.

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