Paper: LTrack: Stealthy Tracking of Mobile Phones in LTE

September 29, 2025

Today’s seminar will be based on the USENIX Security ‘22 paper LTrack: Stealthy Tracking of Mobile Phones in LTE by Kotuliak et al. The paper introduces a novel attack for passively and stealthily tracking mobile phones by combining location sniffing with a new method to extract a phone’s permanent identifier (IMSI).

We will give a short presentation on the paper at the beginning of the seminar, which will lead into a broader discussion about the ongoing privacy challenges in cellular protocols, the real-world feasibility of such attacks, and potential mitigations.