Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G
Researchers find standards-compliant functionality can be abused to hijack modems, downgrade connections, and even execute code
Researchers have found that a malicious SIM card can tell some phones and cellular-connected devices to leak data, drop to 2G, shut themselves down, or even execute code, all thanks to functionality that's supposed to be there.
The research [PDF], presented at the USENIX WOOT conference in Baltimore this week, examines proactive SIM functionality, which allows a SIM to issue commands to the device hosting it.
One of those is RUN AT, which allows the SIM to request the execution of AT commands, the instruction set that's been bossing modems around since the 1980s. Give that ability to a hostile SIM, and things get rather more interesting.
Tomasz Piotr Lisowski and Marius Muench of the University of Birmingham, working with Fuzzware's Kristian Covic, built a toolkit called CATANA to see what a malicious SIM...
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