building a power outage alert notification:
We will build a device to notify us in case of a power outage in our home. For that we just need to re-purpose a GSM tracker.
Post-scriptum: do not waste any time on the Orange Pi 2G IoT.
While the idea and the hardware sound nice, after working a bit with it, there are just too many issues:
- the official Linux distributions are old (> 1 year), the kernel is even older (it still is a 3.10)
- the serial port is unstable (freeze on overrun)
- the wifi is very unstable
- the wifi MAC changes at every boot
- the battery managment actually does not work at at all (no power and no charging due to a mistake in the design)
- it is not supported by armbian
Published: 2018-05-27 by King Kévin
Have you managed to disable the phone home to gpsui.net?
Some hacker has reverse engineered a similar device which also used gpsui.net as the master server. He then found vulnerabilities in the website which allows him to hijack all the devices. He hasn’t found a way to disable the device to phone home to that master server, though.
You can find more information here https://ha.cking.ch/s8_data_line_locator/#gpsui.net or more specific to the vulnerabilities he found here https://0x0.li/trackmageddon/
In the video I did not have any issue with the device connecting to gpsui.net because the GSM network I set up did not provide GPRS data services.
For the final installation (using a public commercial GSM network) I am using a pre-paid SIM card which only allows SMSs and calls. This SIM card does not allow to use any data, thus the device won’t be able to connect to gpsui.net through GRPS (although it will keep trying).
I am not aware of any other method to prevent the tracker from phoning home. The research you mentioned was already it in the corresponding wiki article: https://wiki.cuvoodoo.info/doku.php?id=gsm_tracker#links, along with some other links that might be of interest.