original source : http://www.freewebs.com/simcloneinfo/
I have shown how parties with physical access to a victim’s GSM cellphone can “clone” the phone and fraudulently place calls billed to the victim’s account. This shows that the GSM fraud-prevention framework fails to live up to expectations, and casts doubt on its foundation (as well as the design process). However, we should be clear that this is only a partial flaw, not a total failure of the authentication framework: our experiments have been limited to showing that GSM phones can be cloned if the attacker has physical access to the target phone. (In US analog cellphones, one can clone the cellphones with only some radio reception equipment, which is a much more serious flaw; as a consequence, US providers lose over $500 million yearly to fraud.) (more…)