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Capturing GSM identification or beacon frames

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Will wireshark work in capturing the identification or beacon frame in GSM traffic? I am not interesting in intercepting or decrypting calls. I just need to capture of log the mobile presence with any unique identifier.

asked 29 Jun '16, 04:28

Sherine's gravatar image

Sherine
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One Answer:

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Wireshark is just the last element of the toolchain which starts from an antenna and continues basically by hardware capable of receiving the signal and demodulating it and a software creating a frame stream out of the received bit stream.

Wireshark has recently been enhanced with an API for capturing from any such software in real time. It is called extcap and the description is here, but it doesn't relieve the software from the need to provide the data in the form of a stream of frames with additional information in pcap format - the "only" advantage of this API is that it has made live capture from such sources possible.

As the air interface of GSM is TDM, the software part of your capturing setup may have to do quite a lot to extract something that Wireshark could handle.

Google is your friend here as several projects deal with the task, using COTS hardware (usually USB DVB-T tuners) for the job. Before you ask, GSM modems (neither USB sticks nor modules embedded into notebooks) aren't usable for the purpose.

answered 29 Jun '16, 07:21

sindy's gravatar image

sindy
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accept rate: 24%