Web 2.0 existing telecommunications companies are massive vulnerabilities for us all, they record personal information in databases, and have very clear chokepoints. Their databases tie our phone numbers, personal names, and IMEI numbers to each of our personal devices. Telecom companies prioritize convenience for providing a consumer product and don’t treat our phone numbers like the bank accounts they are now.
In the current system, mobile providers maintain information required to route calls from human friendly phone numbers to IMEIs, a unique number for identifying a device on a mobile network, basically your phone’s social security number. Your carrier can blacklist a device based on its IMEI number and can contact other carriers to do the same. This means the phone won’t be able to make/receive calls anymore or connect online via the cellular network, even with a new SIM card…
The problem is when the attacker can spoof this system and prevent or slow down an IMEI blacklisting, giving them time to carry out an attack. This problem could easily worsen in the age of crypto millionaires and deep fakes, as there are far more targets with vulnerabilities. Phone numbers can be hijacked, allowing attackers to intercept phone calls and text messages.
This is the fault of carriers for their authentication procedures. A single employee at a call center can make a mistake and it can compromise your entire digital identity. Only mobile networks are aware of phone number re-assignments. Service providers have no way to know if a phone number recently transferred to a new device.
SAFENET proposes the future of mobile auth where hashed phone information can be queried from a public blockchain served between providers and 3rd parties consumers to signal changes or suspicious activity. We implemented BUIDLHub’s integrations to save hours of time dealing with backend and used Arbitrum Rollup to help design a very low cost solution by today’s standards that would help with high chain throughput.
Mitchell Opatowsky - official-mitchell#8879
Michael Coon - mdcoon#2024
Michael Powers
Michael Cohen - mjc716#7961