IMSI Catcher

Abstract

Electronic Warfare is one of the major deciding factors in success of conventional and unconventional warfare. As RF technology is advancing with a very high pace, the conventional Electronic Warfare equipment are getting obsolete along with. Pakistan Army has indoctrinated a large quantity of Electronic Warfare equipment and still more is required to compete current requirement, owing to high tension scenario at borders and operational areas. These high-cost equipment are prone to frequent upgradation and maintenance as well as they are highly resource dependent. Considering above mentioned issues related to the EW equipment that Pak Army is using, they are seldom utilized for difficult terrains and border areas and are to be kept as reserve for conventional warfare. To aid heavily strained sector of EW, we utilized Software Defined Radios (SDR) to form a small portable detachment that can analyze RF spectrum, demodulate, decode and Identify Radio Sets being used in the vicinity of operator. These detachments being highly mobile and very less resource demanding, can be moved to any location for operation. We made considerable efforts in demodulation of non-encrypted radio channels and RF finger printing of radio by analyzing their frequency spectral density and frequency-time graphs. As Software Defined Radios are entirely computer dependent, the possibility of obsoletion of equipment is considerably reduced. New protocols can be programmed using opensource software and they can be implemented by SDR connected to computer via USB. All the computation and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is to be handled by computer attached to SDR, hence performance of SDR is directly dependent on processing power of computer they are attached with, which is very cheap in comparison to traditional EW equipment upgradation. The RF fingerprinting is an important enhancement to EW sector, as this technology was not available to Pak Army, and we proudly have for the first time provided possible methodology and promising result.