There is an interesting article about Intercepting Calls and Cloning Phones With Femtocells from security watch.
The sign at the door is pretty ominous with its simple warning: "Cellular Interception Demonstration In Progress."
"While in this room, CDMA cell phone users may experience cellular
interception, modification, or loss of service, including loss of 911
service. By entering this room, you acknowledge and consent to that
interception, modification, or loss of service. If you use a CDMA device
while in this room, you may only communicate with parties have
consented to interception and modification of communications. If you
wish to avoid interception or modification of your CDMA communications,
please turn off your CDMA devices while in this room."
The sign was over the doorway to the room where researchers from iSec
Partners demonstrated how they exploited a vulnerability in the way
mobile devices connected to a femtocell, a miniature cell tower, to
eavesdrop on people's conversations and impersonate their phones. If
this sounds scary, it should. This is the Black Hat conference at Las
Vegas, and researchers take pride in showing how practically any form of
technology can be hacked.
Femtocells are network devices that people can get from their carrier
to boost their cellular signal. For example, your office building or
your house, may have really poor cell reception. You can request a
femtocell from the carrier and plug it into your local network. The
femtocell communicates with the carrier's internal network over a secure
tunnel to become part of the cellular network. Mobile devices connect
to the femtocell and function as if it was connecting to one of the
cellular towers. Most users won't even notice the difference.
This is an automatic process, as phones connect to the tower with the
strongest signal. That can be the cell tower, or it can be the
femtocell, Doug DePerry, senior security engineer at iSec Partners said
in his presentation. "This is not like joining an open WiFi network. There is no user interaction," he said, before adding, "You might be on ours right now."
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