It’s 2018 and many people are still using unencrypted wireless communications in critical systems. We will review how to build a robust and open signals intelligence (SIGINT) platform. As a proof of concept we show the platform capturing the pager bands. The talk will focus on how we demodulate, decode and analyze pages across the entire band using a Raspberry Pi. We will cover some SDR-related design and development issues, discuss DSP and other sundries in basic detail. We’ll also make a few observations about unencrypted communications today, using data captured in midtown Manhattan. Finally, there will be a discussion of some other applications that the same capture infrastructure can be used for, including some we’ve been building.
We’ll also run a real-time capture during the talk, showing what can be seen around the conference venue–all using a single Raspberry Pi.