Everything is still Work in Progress :)

Python wrapped RTL_SDR based GSM sniffer that uses a software defined radio to sniff gsm traffic and print out a list of IMSI’s in the area, a list of local cell towers or other features as I think of them.

This project is more of a proof of concept than anything too solid. I started learning python/programming not long ago and wanted something to work on.

• Python 2.7 (Should be converting to 3.x fairly soon)
• gnuradio – www.gnuradio.org
• gr-gsm - https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/tree/master/include/grgsm
• kalibrate-rtl - https://github.com/steve-m/kalibrate-rtl
• RTL_SDR device. Can be bought for as little as £10 from amazon, I’ve tested this with RTL2838 DVB-T based and e4000 based software defined radios
• Something to run it all on – I’ve had this working on Ubuntu / Kali Linux VM’s as well Kali directly installed on Linx 1010b tablet. While I’ve managed to get most of this working with a raspberry pi 3, I haven’t had it successfully running yet and some troubleshooting is still needed.

I’ve had some success with this method, but it does sometimes throw up some errors and it is really not suitable for low power systems such as the raspberry pi.

sudo apt-get install git python-pip

sudo pip install PyBOMBS

sudo pybombs prefix init /usr/local -a default_prx

sudo pybombs config default_prefix default_prx

sudo pybombs recipes add gr-recipes git+https://github.com/gnuradio/gr-recipes.git

sudo pybombs recipes add gr-etcetera git+https://github.com/gnuradio/gr-etcetera.git

During the next step, errors may be received depending on which versions of the software are being installed. I’ve added solutions below to some of the errors I’ve encountered. Others may take some troubleshooting on your end but I’ve found manually installing the software that caused the error then running pybombs again usually fixes things.

sudo pybombs install gr-gsm

sudo ldconfig

First install libssl1.0-dev

apt-get install libssl1.0-dev

next navigate to /usr/local/src/apche-thrift/lib/cpp/src/thrift/transport/TSSLSocket.cpp

open this file with a text editor

search for SSLv3 and change the second occurrence to SSLv23

e.g. "...SSLv3_method()" becomes "...SSLv23_method()"

Save changes and exit

pybombs install gr-gsm

apt-get install libosmocore*

apt-get install gnutls*

pybombs install gr-gsm

To be continued…