Can they hear me now?: a security analysis of law enforcement wiretaps

Although modern communications services are susceptible to third-party eavesdropping via a wide range of possible techniques, law enforcement agencies in the US and other countries generally use one of two technologies when they conduct legally-authorized interception of telephones and other communications traffic. The most common of these, designed to comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), use a standard interface provided in network switches. This paper analyzes the security properties of these interfaces. We demonstrate that the standard CALEA interfaces are vulnerable to a range of unilateral attacks by the intercept target. In particular, because of poor design choices in the interception architecture and protocols, our experiments show it is practical for a CALEA-tapped target to overwhelm the link to law enforcement with spurious signaling messages without degrading her own traffic, effectively preventing call records as well as content...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Micah Sherr, Gaurav Shah, Eric Cronin, Sandy Clark, Matt Blaze
• Keywords: CCS 2009, Law Enforcement, Law Enforcement Agencies, Security Privacy, Standard Calea Interfaces