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A New Design Approach for Mobile Devices Security against IMEI Tampering and Cloning

Naveen Jakhar

The advancements in VLSI design technologies, economy of scale, mass production, reduced prices of mobile devices and aggressive competition in the market have made mobile phones affordable to common man and it helps him to stay connected with his near and dear ones at anytime and anywhere. The IMEI for GSM/UMTS/LTE phones and ESN for CDMA phones is the unique identity of any mobile device. After November 2008, ESN has been replaced by MEID in CDMA mobile devices. But along with the genuine mobile devices, rogue and sub-standard mobile devices are being sold in the markets which are either having illegal IMEI or cloned IMEI. Also, Internet is flooded with hardware flashers devices and software tools which are being used by the malicious persons for tampering and cloning the IMEIs of mobile devices [1]. These tampered mobile devices are then used for frauds, illegal acts, and anti- national activities and thereby cause a serious threat to security. The Law Enforcement Agencies and Telecom Enforcement agencies have a major task at their hands as to how to design innovative solutions and stop these rogue devices from entering any telecom network. In this article, we shall be discussing a new, hardware design based approach which shall be very effective against IMEI cloning and tampering. The paper discusses the use of life cycle based security of IMEI of the mobile device, implementation of challenge response system module in the hardware design, mirrored and majority principles for ensuring integrity of IMEI and its protection against tampering and cloning. The article also envisages the use of centralized EIR for secured telecom networks.