RayHunter and Access Denied

If you have a spare Orbic RC400L laying around, EFF’s RayHunter might give it a new lease to life. It always warms my heart to see old (and cheap) equipment get some even as it gets gray in hair. So, of course, I tried to get RayHunter running.

Fortunately, instructions are reasonably clear. Just download the latest release and run install-linux.sh. However, on my computer that resulted in an error:

thread 'main' panicked at serial/src/main.rs:151:27:
device found but failed to open: Access denied (insufficient permissions)
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

Error is clear - insufficient permissions. And you can get around it by running stuff as root. But that should be only the last resort. Proper way to handle this is to add USB device rule that will put it into plugdev group and thus allow current user to access it (at least on Ubuntu).

To do this, first add a file to /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory for 05c6:f601 device (double-check numbers using lsusb, if needed).

sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/42-orbic-rc400l.rules << EOF
ACTION=="add", \
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", \
ATTRS{idVendor}=="05c6", \
ATTRS{idProduct}=="f601", \
GROUP="plugdev", \
TAG+="uaccess", \
ATTR{power/control}:="auto"
EOF

Once file is in place, just reload the rules (or restart the computer).

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

With this, script should now update device without any further problems.

PS: It’s really hard for me to tell if IMSI catcher update even works since I never had it trigger.

PPS: Rather than messing with wireless, I like to just access server via USB (adb can be found in platform-tools directory):

./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080
firefox http://localhost:8080/