Qualcomm based cellular data modems wih Linux¶

• Table of contents
• Qualcomm based cellular data modems wih Linux
  • Wiki structure
  • Mailing List
  • related reading
    • 33C3 Talk by Holger Freyther and Harald Welte
  • Information sources

DISCLAIMER: No information here is officially provided by Qualcomm, Quectel or other modem manufacturers. It is the result of independent third-party research and should be taken with a a grain of salt

This is the place where we gather information about the Quectel EC20, EC21 and EC25 modules, as well as other Qualcomm based cellular modems with built-in Linux processor.

Please help us to grow this resource for the benefit of the general public.

It is a shame that Qualcomm doesn't disclose proper documentation for their products to the general public. There are many possible applications and use cases which are possible once more information about those devices is publicly available. Having the power of running customer/user-specific programs inside the Linux in the modem is very powerful, and can for example eliminate the use of a dedicated external processor in many M2M/IoT applications.

An overview of Qualcomm Gobi Modems and their specs can be found at https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/gobi-product-specs.pdf

From that table, we suspect that all cellular modem chips that have a "Cortex A5" application processor are candidates for the Qualcomm Linux based modems.

Wiki structure¶

Please see the below auto-generated hierarchical index of wiki pages:

• Devices
  • Smartphone Modems
    • Apple IPhone 5
    • Pine64 Pinephone
    • Samsung Midas 4G
  • Standalone modems
    • D-Link DWM-222 stick
    • Gobi modems
    • Huawei
      • Huawei ME906
        • Huawei ME906v adb
    • MangOH Green with WP8548 Module
    • Option Icon2 stick
    • Quectel
      • AT Commands
      • EC20
        • EC20 Additional Software
        • EC20 Booting
        • EC20 DFOTA
        • EC20 Firmware Versions
        • EC20 Linux
        • EC20 QFlash
        • EC20 QMI
        • EC20 syslog
        • LsOfOutput
      • EC21
      • EC25
        • EC25 Firmware Update Format
        • EC25 Linux
        • EC25 QFlash
        • EC25 QMI
      • FOTA
      • UC20
    • Sierra Wireless Modems
      • Sierra Wireless Legato
    • SIMCom
    • ZTE MF823
• Qualcomm Linux
  • Debug Utilities
  • Diag
    • Diag mdlog
  • Improved Linux USB Driver
  • Installing Software
  • QCMAP
  • QMH
  • QMI
    • Qmuxd
  • Qualcomm Kernel
    • Android USB Gadget
    • IPC Logging
    • Qualcomm Linux SMD
  • Qualcomm OE MSM
• SOCs
  • Qualcomm MDM9607
  • Qualcomm MDM9615

Mailing List¶

We have started the qc-linux-modems@lists.osmocom.org mailing list for any related discussions.

You can manage your subscription at https://lists.osmocom.org/mailman/listinfo/qc-linux-modems

related reading¶

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2023/DEF%20CON%2023%20presentations/DEFCON-23-Mickey-Shkatov-Jesse-Michael-Scared-poopless-LTE-and-your-laptop-UPDATED.pdf
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-Solnik-Cellular-Exploitation-On-A-Global-Scale-The-Rise-And-Fall-Of-The-Control-Protocol.pdf

33C3 Talk by Holger Freyther and Harald Welte¶

At 33C3:"http://events.ccc.de/congress/2016", Holger and Harald first publicly presented about this project.

• Video Recording: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8151-dissecting_modern_3g_4g_cellular_modems
• Slides (PDF): https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/system/event_attachments/attachments/000/003/151/original/Dissecting_modern_%283G_4G%29_cellular_modems.pdf
• Slides (HTML): http://git.gnumonks.org/laforge-slides/plain/2016/cellular_modems_33c3/33c3-modems.html

Information sources¶

All information here is based on publicly found documents on the internet as well as studying the source code released by Qualcomm, Quectel and others as well as bits of reverse engineering on the devices themselves. We commit to legal forms of reverse engineering, such as running software in emulators, using tracing and debugging facilities.