By Kevin Lee and Arvind Narayanan 35 million phone numbers are disconnected every year in the U.S., according to the Federal Communications Commission. Most of these numbers are not disconnected forever; after a while, carriers reassign them to new subscribers. Through the years, these new subscribers have sometimes reported receiving calls and messages meant for […]
Phone number recycling creates serious security and privacy risks to millions of people
May 3, 2021 by
Vulnerability reporting is dysfunctional
March 25, 2020 by
By Kevin Lee, Ben Kaiser, Jonathan Mayer, and Arvind Narayanan In January, we released a study showing the ease of SIM swaps at five U.S. prepaid carriers. These attacks—in which an adversary tricks telecoms into moving the victim’s phone number to a new SIM card under the attacker’s control—divert calls and SMS text messages away […]
What happens when responsible disclosure fails?
December 5, 2012 by
The topic of how to handle security vulnerabilities has been discussed for years. Wikipedia defines responsible disclosure as: Responsible disclosure is a computer security term describing a vulnerability disclosure model. It is like full disclosure, with the addition that all stakeholders agree to allow a period of time for the vulnerability to be patched before […]
