> It never really took off though, and even back in its early days it saw barely any use. Over the years it just deteriorated further, and today it's basically completely dead.
It's actually not completely dead... It's just (almost) completely non-public.
You can subscribe to services to get number porting information where the interface is basically e164.arpa/ENUM queries to a private nameserver over a VPN. I don't know the details, the cost was high enough that it didn't make sense for my employer to pursue it.
It's also not uncommon for telecom providers to use it for their own internal routing because enough telecom software did in fact develop support for it despite lack of public implementations.
As someone who's been in the VoIP industry for over 20 years it makes me sad to think of what could have been if both ENUM and IPv6 were more widely adopted. For many years you could reach me via email, SIP, or Jabber with the same identifier and if there were effective support for ENUM in the USA my work phone number would have been able to connect you to any of them, directly and with G.722 HD voice long before it eventually came to modern cellular networks.
There was a startup called WUPHF that used some telecom wizardry to multicast messages between providers given a single identifier, I'm not sure what happened to it...
Yep. The traffic he got appears to be stuff that should have remained private that leaked to a public network; it's not the first time that's happened, particularly for U.S. military traffic which is accustomed to having its own publicly-routable /8's, as opposed to the rest of us who use non-routable 10, 192, etc. space.
I love the line near the end of the article: "So in the end, I was down 10€ in domain fees, there was sadly no bug bounty (I thankfully didn't get my door kicked in at least)."
Makes me cringe, imagining what that would be like.
Given the author appears to be a 19 year old German girl, UK bureaucrats proxying admin duties for offshore territories are unlikely to be motivated to start an international extradition for what amounts to a helpful tip.
It is a shame they did not actually set up a SIP server and see if any of those requests turned into actual call terminations.
There is another schema called TRIP [1] - telephony routing over ip that uses a number format "1234*1455" designed to be entered on a standard phone keypad. When I registered my ITAD (internet telephony administrative domain, the RHS of a TRIP number) I was lucky enough to get one that matches my local dialling code!
It's funny how such holes can remain for years, and no one notices until someone stumbles upon them. It's interesting that no serious organization wanted to address the issue until it was discovered that the military was involved.
It's a shame the author wasn't rewarded but at least the story can now be told over a beer.
I enjoyed reading this much more than anything I read here recently. In particular I like how it absolutely shows that somethings just… fall through the cracks!
Their homepage, https://lina.sh/, reminds me of the early days of the internet. Are webrings back in fashion? Or is this just a group of old school folks keeping the nostalgia alive?
Man, you really got lucky they didn’t throw you in jail. Anything related to national defense is pretty scary. Do you think you might get some kind of reward for exposing this vulnerability?
I know opinions about Mitnick are quite divided. But I enjoyed reading "Ghost in the Wires" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10256723-ghost-in-the-wi...). It's giving this 90s-era hacker vibe that's kinda fun (even if the truth might be stretched a bit).
Now a question daunted on me. Assuming away strategies like store-and-decrypt-later-in-a-quantum-future, could a MITM really eavesdrop, as in, aren’t such ARPA-routed phone calls encrypted?
The article mentions Ascension Island, a small island in the south atlantic. There's a really great spy novel that takes places there, Ascension by Oliver Harris.
This is a great story. Almost wish the author had dug a little further in and discovered something like Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg, but a nice writeup nontheless.
Makes me wonder how many partly implemented but ignored protocols like this exist.
The article covers it, but to reiterate. Yes, The idea is to have a mechanism to map phone numbers to hosts.
The normal path for voip phones given a phone number is to end up at a sip trunk provider go over the traditional phone network (which at this point probably routes over the internet anyway) hit another sip trunk and end up at the receiving sip phone.
This provides a method to bypass the traditional phone network and go directly over the internet. The sip phone looks up the host responsible for that phone number and directly connects. The sip providers would be responsible for maintaining this number to host mapping in dns.
When you think about it DNS is really just a big distributed phone book, a key value store to look up numbers based on names. The reverse records are a method to look up names based on numbers using that same distributed architecture.
There is also an interesting legacy architecture interaction here, traditional phones can only enter numbers. Cell phones could use dns names directly(but don't) or we could use ip addresses as a sort of modern phone number(but don't), The whole world was connected via phone numbers and that is now how we expect phones to operate.
Having looked into the matter, 4000 people live there. It's entirely possible there are subscribers outside the base, so numbers for that area aren't neccesarily terminated at the base. That said, it's likely. Military IT is rumoured to be outdated and awful.
no citizens are allowed on diego garcia and the native population was entirely kicked out. You need a very difficult to aquire permit directly from the millitary to land there.
I'm 99% sure anyone living there is millitary. There were some people fleeing from the sri lankan civil war that landed there and were stuck there for a bunch of years claiming asylum while the millitary tried to figure out what to do with them, but they were sent off the island a while back.
It's actually not completely dead... It's just (almost) completely non-public.
You can subscribe to services to get number porting information where the interface is basically e164.arpa/ENUM queries to a private nameserver over a VPN. I don't know the details, the cost was high enough that it didn't make sense for my employer to pursue it.
As someone who's been in the VoIP industry for over 20 years it makes me sad to think of what could have been if both ENUM and IPv6 were more widely adopted. For many years you could reach me via email, SIP, or Jabber with the same identifier and if there were effective support for ENUM in the USA my work phone number would have been able to connect you to any of them, directly and with G.722 HD voice long before it eventually came to modern cellular networks.
I love the line near the end of the article: "So in the end, I was down 10€ in domain fees, there was sadly no bug bounty (I thankfully didn't get my door kicked in at least)."
Makes me cringe, imagining what that would be like.
you know there’s hope for our future.
There is another schema called TRIP [1] - telephony routing over ip that uses a number format "1234*1455" designed to be entered on a standard phone keypad. When I registered my ITAD (internet telephony administrative domain, the RHS of a TRIP number) I was lucky enough to get one that matches my local dialling code!
https://tripresurgence.org/trip/history/ [1]
It's a shame the author wasn't rewarded but at least the story can now be told over a beer.
Makes me wonder how many partly implemented but ignored protocols like this exist.
Is this related to Softphone / VOIP in any way?
The normal path for voip phones given a phone number is to end up at a sip trunk provider go over the traditional phone network (which at this point probably routes over the internet anyway) hit another sip trunk and end up at the receiving sip phone.
This provides a method to bypass the traditional phone network and go directly over the internet. The sip phone looks up the host responsible for that phone number and directly connects. The sip providers would be responsible for maintaining this number to host mapping in dns.
When you think about it DNS is really just a big distributed phone book, a key value store to look up numbers based on names. The reverse records are a method to look up names based on numbers using that same distributed architecture.
There is also an interesting legacy architecture interaction here, traditional phones can only enter numbers. Cell phones could use dns names directly(but don't) or we could use ip addresses as a sort of modern phone number(but don't), The whole world was connected via phone numbers and that is now how we expect phones to operate.
> So I had accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone numbers and timestamps for calls going to military bases.
That's quite a jump to conclusion right there.
I'm 99% sure anyone living there is millitary. There were some people fleeing from the sri lankan civil war that landed there and were stuck there for a bunch of years claiming asylum while the millitary tried to figure out what to do with them, but they were sent off the island a while back.
There are none. The native Chagossians were all expelled in the 1960s-70s.