Applied Research on security of TETRA radio

The digital professional mobile radio system TETRA is used by a wide range of users in almost all continents of the world. TETRA has been designed with the specific security and safety needs of police, law enforcement and other government authorities in mind. However, in reality again all security features are optional - like in GSM.

While government users typically use most or all of those security features, many commercial users of TETRA chose to not use them - most likely driven by budget constraints.

The OsmocomTETRA project has created a software radio receiver for the TETRA air interface, similar to what airprobe has done for GSM. Using this receiver plus associated protocol analysis tools, we are able to investigate and research the security level of real-world TETRA networks.

We are also working on something similar to OpenBTS or OpenBSC, i.e. software to run our own minimalistic TETRA network for further research.