Ninja Tel - amateur wireless telephone network on Defcon

The WiFi network at the Defcon annual conference is a haven for a whole bunch of enthusiasts who are thinking of something not very good, constantly intercepting packets, scanning ports and exploiting any available vulnerabilities just for the sake of hacking. This year a private telephone network was organized on top of it.

The launch of own cellular networks has happened more than once, for example, at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. A couple of years ago, it was publicly announced that GSM, the format of cellular networks, was compromised, so hackers have been looking for alternative protocols for a long time. The Ninja Networks team took SIP over WiFi and conventional GSM as the basis.
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One of the organizers of the Brandon “cstone” project, Creighton, says that they launched their own telephone company on pure enthusiasm, officially sponsored by such giants as Zynga and Facebook. The most popular social networking service has long been trying to create its mobile platform, and although Mark Zakerberg denied such rumors in a recent financial report, there is a clear interest in the work of hackers from Facebook.



Friends of the creators of Ninja Tel and the helpers received 650 HTC One V devices with a greatly modified operating system Android 4.0.3. Ice Cream Sandwich can direct calls via GSM or via SIP through a dedicated part of the defcon WiFi, which the team’s engineers used. Each subscriber's phone has a contact synchronization application, so a new subscriber can write and call from the moment of his registration. The user contact has a user-selectable individual number and login, as well as a photo avatar.



The user receives a phone with a special SIM card. When first loaded, the phone displays an unusual, but very honest user agreement, stating that Ninja Tel now has the right to listen and read, as well as to record and use any messages sent on the network, of which the new subscriber becomes a part. However, as noted in the agreement, AT & T also provides all the necessary data at the request of the US National Security Agency, and the entire network is built just for fun.



A van with the Ninja Tel logo parked in the corresponding section of the conference is not distinguished by anything other than a three-half-meter antenna on the roof and a lot of equipment inside that ensures the operation of the base station and the Asterisk and OpenBTS programs. The network does not have encryption, there are no emergency phone numbers, but it is possible to call, write, arrange conference calls or play a small game with other people, for which, again, servers were installed in the van. Fathers-creators say that the largest OpenBTS network in history has turned out.

Work on the project took 10 months, and its value was not disclosed. The network worked not without failures, and only 650 people out of 13 thousand people who attended the conference received telephone sets, but all the rest showed strong interest in Ninja Tel. Entrance to a closed club of subscribers of an annually convened network can be earned literally with blood: by recording a bone marrow or blood donation, by donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Of course, the hacker conference network was tried to be hacked, but the only attempt was unsuccessful. The network creators themselves say that they are a constructive group that wants to create something new and cannot earn a good name by hacking.

Based on Cnet .