Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new method of detecting if smartphones have been tampered with, the entities announced today.
According to the report, the approach would not be limited to 4G or 5G phones because it focuses on the fundamental electromagnetic behavior of the hardware.
The context is that smartphones are extremely important to secure, but it is difficult to do so without damaging them. The method for identifying tampered smartphones that the two organizations developed relies upon creating a remote fingerprint of the electromagnetic properties of signals sent by different model devices. Specialized SIM cards and cellular radio standards-compliant base station emulator equipment are used to do this…