Slashdot Mirror
Cracking GSM
RobertM writes "Professor Eli Biham, one of the worlds most famous crypto analysts, together with two of his students presented an interesting paper on flaws in GSM at the IACR Crypto conference. The GSM association is not happy. Read more on theReg." There's also a Reuters article about the situation.
I wonder how long it will be till they attempt to use the DMCA to silence him - this is after all a typical scenario for the DMCA to be exploited in order to gag scientists and cryptology experts.
Sadly, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see this end up on chillingeffects in the near future.
The US CIA, UK M5 and Israel Mossad are now hiring people with experience with GSM and crypto experience.
I always thought a funny and interesting practical application of cracking GSM, or pretending to be a mobile phone mast through other means would be to ring everyone's mobile up in the area at the same time and have them all talk to each other. That would be excellent!
I don't see how this is news, I've known about this for months, I heard them talking about it on their GSM pho- uh, nevermind.
...the chosen people have figured out how to break a very difficult encryption.
See? I told you they were the chosen ones. Good looks after his own.
I'm out.
Please try to keep posts on topic.
The International Journal of Digital Evidencehas a current article about GSM forensics.
"The paper was presented at last month's Crypto Conference in Santa Barbara, California but news of this alarming discovery only broke yesterday."
Because most of the attendees were sleeping after a heavy lunch and martinis.
Since Israel and the US are such close allies, how will the US administration look upon Israeli scientists doing something that's a violation of the DMCA? And presenting it at a public conference, no less....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
1. Does DCMA and its cousins allow such methods to be patented?
2. Will the phreakers care about patents?
the UK M5 is a road. perhaps you mean MI5?
that just as the mobile phone companies are desperate to move people on to the next generation of mobile technology, it is revealed that an older technology is flawed.
Amazing.
Don
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Eatthepuddingeatthepuddingeatthepudding
Slashdot - The Home of the Tortured Analogy
Illegal interception of calls will be prevented by patenting the technology?
I'm sure that a criminal really cares about patent infringements.
Laws should not be used to shore up broken technology. This only impedes law abiding citizens, and does nothing to improve the protection against crime.
This one arguement against gun control, make them illegal and only criminals will have guns.
Make this illegal and only criminals will listen to your phone call.
Elad, Nathan, Eli Biham and Orr Dunkelman (which was not listed for some reason) are friends of mine at the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology. Their previous attack on A5/1 required a few hundred GB of HD space and dedicated telephony equipment to pull. A5/2 is a peace of cake in comparison. This new attack makes it ciphertext only. That means that you don't have to initiate a short call (for example) to the evesdropee or knowing some part of the call (like with voicemail) before breaking the encryption. It uses the signal correction mechanism to initialize itself.
In general, this is no big news, because this equipment is hard to aquire and the benefits are not that great. In comparison, CDMA and TDMA don't (effectively) encrypt calls at all.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Last time I told a software manufacturer about security flaws they were like, oh we don't care - our users are too dumb to work it out. Uh huh, but what about the competition? I'm sure their opinion would change had I released an exploit for it.
Similarly, the GSM Association probably knew about it, it's probably a designed-in backdoor to allow governmental evesdropping, but now it's public knowledge they're unhappy. Notice they say "very difficult" to exploit - not impossible. They know what's up, and they should've done better.
Well boo hoo GSM. If you've got flaws, fix them - don't go whining when someone finds you out and talks about it. No software is perfect, and trying to pretend otherwise (incl. with DMCA court action) is just a revised addition of The Emporers Clothes.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
According to Reuters, the Association claims an attacker would have to "transmit distinctive data over the air to masquerade as a GSM base station". An attacker would also have to be placed between a caller and a base station to intercept a call, it adds.
So, it's possible to intercept calls by mimicing a base station by placing yourself where a base station could be? Sounds awfully like a game of monkey-in-the-middle to me.
My generalization probably makes this seem more "duh, obvious" than it likely is.
I have been looking for a good source on the security of CDMA (2000 - 1X, but also CDMA). I have found the basic stuff using google, but is difficult to find real info given that almost all the google results are for press releases or biz-talk from the technology providers (qualcomm, ericsson, motorola, etc) and all of them state "great security".
The question is can somebody deploy a off-the-shelf (or homebuilt) scanner and grab the conversations on-the-air? I know that a PR (pseudo random) number is used with the ESN and A-key to generate some keys for encrypting some of the communications, and that the voice channel is "scrambled", but is there a source where the security implications of this is discussed?
Also interesting is that this article appeared (or was going to) on yesterday's slashdot edition but after being available for subscribers for a while it dissapeared.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
The encryption is only between the handset and the base station. The goverment can easily evesdrop at the cellular provider (after issuing a warrant).
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
"they can hear you now."
"they can hear you now."
From theReg...
Both parties agree that the issue does not affect 3G phones, which use different protocols and security mechanisms than legacy GSM handsets.
Hmmm. If I remember well, other Israeli crypto researchers, including Pr Shamir (of RSA fame, Rivest - Shamir - Adelman) mentioned a couple of years ago that GSM crypto could, theoretically, be cracked almost in real time by a (relatively) low-powered machine.
GSM specialists have known for a number of years now that GSM crypto was not that good. Interestingly enough, GSM crypto was designed by French 'military specialists', which has raised the usual (probably justified) suspicions of backdoors.
Sorry for not being able to produce more info, but I am sure other Slashdotters will have interesting links to supply...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The novelety of this attack is that it is instantanous. The cryptanalysis is done one when the call is being established (when the phone just rings) even before any any real conversation is being done.
The exact details are still secret but the attack exploits a misuse of Error Correcting Codes (ECC - are used in communication protocols to correct random noise errors).
It seems that instead of encrypting the conversation and then employing ECC, the GSM does it the other way thus leaking enough data for the cryptanalysis to be performed
Not only does the US fund the weaponry that allows the illegal incursions into Palestinean soveriegn terrority (in the name of "the war against terrorism"), it allows the Israeli people to have one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East while families in Palestine starve and worry about food, clean water and medical care.
.
And Americans cry and wail and wonder why (and I actually heard this coming from some Midwestern mother of three after some recent attacks in the Middle East) why do they hate us so much? They must hate our freedoms
Yeah, that's it. They hate our freedom. Look how we continue to support a regime that enslaves and subjugates the Arab people of the MIddle East for the US's own oil thirst. No wonder this is the stupidest country on the planet.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
DMCA stands for Digital Milennium Copyright Act, and prevents the circumvention or cracking of copyright prevention, not of just any form of encryption.
Sure, some lawyer will be able to construct a lawsuit out of this using the DMCA as a leverage, especially since this news will allow people to spread massive amounts of FUD in order to make a quick buck from the techno-illiterate masses, but I don't think the DMCA is violated here.
I don't think it will affect US/Israel relations. The relation the US has with Israel is mostly born out of the massive jewish lobby in the US, who indirectly determine the course of the nation, just like for instance the NRA or the entertainment industry is doing. In order to alter the relation between the US and Israel, you must alter the realtion between the jewish lobby in the US and Israel, and I don't think that's something we'll see soon...
this is only new to the general public.
what do u think the fbi and the feds uses to listen to gsm shit, and crack into the mofo networks?
only cuz some ol' man and his students published this paper now, doesnt mean, that the cia and other agencies didnt listen and record your calls with them terrorists!
wake up guys. this world is getting less trustworthy and unsecure any minute. and its not cuz of them terrorists, but because of them who tell you how bad terrorism and terrorists are, all day long.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
It has long been suspected that GSM encryption was specificaly designed with some 'weak spot' to allow law-enforcemant monitoring.
Does anyone know if the article is available online?
I'd like to know if this flaw looks more like a mistake or somthing more intentional.
None of the meadia people who spoke about it seem to understand that "Instant Ciphertext-Only Cryptanalysis" means you are effectivly not protected at all.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
At least they point out that the equipment required costs about $250k.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Finally one reason for people to upgrade to 3G.
Just saying it like it are.
Prof. Eli Biham and Elad Barkan. Both good friends of mine.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
From http://israelemb.org/sanfran/News&Media/full/03/se p/02#c
"Elad found that the GSM network does not work in proper order: First, it inflates the information passing through it in order to correct for interference and noise and only then encrypts it," Biham told The Jerusalem Post. "At first, I didn't believe it. We checked it, and it was true."
That probably means higher predictability for the encrypted data.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
"America is invincible."
Oh dear. The 2,500 killed in the WTC were invincible then? With America doing so much damage to the world, it's not surprising people will take their own lives to make a stance.
If you think America is invincible, imagine what would've happened if they'd flown those planes into nuclear power stations, packed football stadiums etc.
America's military might may be strong, but you're far more likely to be killed by street crime there than in anywhere in Europe.
Let's see how long you live, eh, invincible boy?
REMOB anyone?
...."
REMOB (Remote observation mode) is a TSPS console feature of the american telephone system to allow inward ops to monitor a suspected phone that might be "off the hook" prior to interrupting the line for "life or dire emergency" with the 500Hz tone and issuance of the frequently heard phrase "This is the att operator do you wish to disconnect this call you have an emergecy phone call from
but PRIOR to that for 30 second maximum bursts you get to hear an inverterted sound wave... which you can record.
better... the fbi has is setup to cascade overlapping series of REMOB snippets so when one ends (on any CLASS capable ESS r5) another takes over.
This way no interrupt chirp is heard by the victims, and lots of trivially "scrambled' speech can be secretly recorded.
i have never ever ever seen this in print or any edoc in history of phreaking.
I have seen telephon reps state to congree that REMOB did not exist.
it exists.
it does not take outside intercepts (ECHELON) as reported on 60 Minutes, or any NRO or NSA budgets,
it only takes a 6 digit code and the correct connections to do REMOB.
REMOB makes intercepting cell phones laughable in comparison.
besides... the German Gov records ALL cell phones under that alleged statement that in theory it COULD intercept the airwaves anyways if they tried. Remeber the slashdot article?
also the us gov allows no-warrant affixing of GPS locater emmitter bugs under your car frame under the assumption that it could visually track you from their air if they had the money anyways. Remember the Scott peterson case this summer? No initial warrant to put the gps bug on his car.
recording and intercepting ALL cell phone traffic at the point of origin on the LAND LINES is what the fed gov assumes is their right!
no need to mess with intercepts.
July 1983 the us supreme court ruled the public had a right to intercept and use all radio trasmissions INCLUDING call phones. Then they pverturned it partly years later.
today it is LEGAL for the cops to buy and sell equipment to record cell phones, but not the public across state borders. you have to build it from scratch yourself for your own hobbyist needs... and then its legal to use.
but REMOB is far far more humorous.
I know it exists.... first hand
From the Reg article:
I don't have the sales figures to hand, but I don't think GSM can really be called a "legacy" technology yet. IIRC Britain only has one provider 3G service provider, which has had a fraction of the expected number of subscribers.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
DMCA...CDMA...
Obviously, this is a campaign backed by American government and corporate interests designed to discredit and undermine the global GSM standard and replace it with the USA-centric CDMA system.
In the bad old days of analog mobile phones, there wasn't even encryption on the signal. You could literally walk into Radio Shack and walk out carrying a scanner capable of receiving mobile phone frequencies. (They eventually banned the sale of scanners capable of receiving those frequencies.) Later, TDMA and CDMA technologies made it more difficult to intercept signals, but all that's required is the right decoder.
Encryption of the call is a fairly recent trend and I think it's a terrific idea, but any encryption can be broken in time. While the odds are low that someone may be listing in, guaranteed privacy is impossible.
I think as a whole, we tend to trust in technology without really understanding it. I'm reminded of two engineering students who were visiting my apartment in college, and showing off their new cell phones by one calling the other. They were quite surprised when I was able to intercept their call with a cheap radio scanner. They had no idea their call was not private, simply assuming that the technology was secure. It wasn't.
18:00-20:30
Beach Barbecue
Bar 18:00-20:30
Buffet 18:15-20:30
Dessert/Coffee 19:00-20:30
I wasn't there but I just know that everyone showed for the beach barbecue with the open bar and grub all night long.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
So if professor publishes this, its all fine and dandy, but when a citizen publishes an eBook hack he's arrested? What gives?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Now all psychos will have to pay me in order to perform their activities.
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Why should all of these law enforcement agencies go through all these troubles? Why not just go to the telco and ask them nicely, I know that some countries (The Netherlands for instance) only give out GSM licenses to telco's who are willing to record all of the conversations done on their network. Law enforcement agencies must have Access to this database. I'm sure The Netherlands isn't the only country with this kind of "license restriction". The stuff needed for this type of eavesdropping is expensive and I think in most countries irrelevant.
It is so strange, the basic principle behind the crack of the code is a flaw in the design of GSM. The engineers who designed GSM added the error corrections after the encryption and you MUST do it before the encryption. This is the reason you can "listen" to the transmission and learn alot about the call and then Decipher the keys. It is truly strange since everybody that deals with encryption know this basic rule.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
Criticism, however, allowed him to improve himself.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
If this cracking method is indeed patented then it must be publicly released for anyone to read and understand. But public release would seem to violate DCMA and stifling the publication would seem to violate the constitutional underpinnings of the patent system (to encourage innovation by both granting monopolies and making inventions publicly accessible for further innovation). Does this make DCMA unconstitutional???
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
echo "G SCMaGnS MyGoSuM GhSeMaGrS MmGeS MnGoSwM?G" | tr -d GSM
The article states... The GSM Association admits the Israeli researchers are onto something but say the attack requires the use of complex technology, which few phone phreakers have access to, and would need to be targeted at a specific caller.
I see ... in other words. They only people you have to fear is your government and large companies.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that governments all across this planet of ours seem to think that the only kind of secrecy that is a good thing is goverment secrecy?
This is an ex-parrot!
"'In the hands of terrorists this would be a disaster, but I don't see how they could get access to it,' said Golan, a former police detective."
Hmm.. Don't the Israelis have it?
- The GSM association is not happy.
They should be happy. It's an opportunity to them to refine their techniques and improve users protection.IMO people should understand that errors found are opportunities to improve quality. Not a way to point incapacity.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
The problem is that it's a terrible situation for everyone over there. Surely everyone has a right to live in peace, and surely that's what most people, Palestinian and Israeli, really want. However, the problems there have become a proxy for everyone else in the world to line up against each other. Arab leaders use it to strengthen their position by distracting their people from their own problems. It has become a platform for conservatives and liberals in this country to each claim the moral high ground on, and to demonize each other.
Somehow, the world gets much more out of the conflict than it gets out of a peaceful resolution. If everyone thinks one side is truly evil, than only that side's elimination or expulsion is satisfactory. So how can peace be satisfactory to the world? Does the Arab world really have an interest in ending the conflict? Do people in the U.S. using it to demonize their political enemies on both sides have an interest in it ending?
I would like to go back there some day with my family and visit all the holy sites, wherever they may be, without fear of being wounded or killed. That is part of my stake. What is the rest of the world's stake?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Perhaps if they'd paid more attention to security and less to cutesy-poo interchangeable faceplates, they wouldn't be unhappy now. Did they have their design checked out by someone who understands cryptography?
What about DMCA? When a russian guy shows security flaws of an application that is used to distribute e-books, he is arrested almost imediately.
But when a Professor shows security flaws of a communication device, that can also be used to delivery copyrighted material nothing happens.
I dunno they'll be arrested!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
The encryption is in the phone, so the phone needs to be upgraded.
From the article on the Register:
"Both parties agree that the issue does not affect 3G phones, which use different protocols and security mechanisms than legacy GSM handsets."
You DO have one of the new phones, right? I mean, you ARE reading Slashdot.
I think this is what's going to keep it from being a problem legally - nobody's introducing phones to which this attack is vulnerable.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
If you look at the United State's military budget, you would see that it is larger than most(if not all) of the world's military budget combined.
Do you think that Russia, any European country (and I will be nice and not pick on France), China or India could possibly deploy the same volume of troops and equipment in the same time span as the US?
If you are a student of Network Centric Warfare, then you would know that only the US of A has the current capability to land a certain number troops in any spot in the world in under 96 hours.
Should I even mention what country has developed the most advanced weapondry the world has ever seen? Russia may have some great engineers but they lack the capability to actually produce working and reliable weapondry. They have great ideas, but their implementation sucks. The Chinese and Indian's just copy whatever we develop.
Do you really think that Europe would throw in with the Chinese, Russians, and Indian's if Great Britain stayed out of it or even threw in with the US?
I think not!
Not to mention that the Russians and Chinese hate each other completely and the chinese and indian's aren't on the most friendly of terms either!
So... yes, I do believe that in a non-nuclear fight, we would beat Europe, China, Russia, and India.
ControlBooth.com
Technical Theater Made Easy!
pleins de filles nues sur les plages de la cote d'azur (nice antibes cannes), fesses a l'air, sur http://plage.xxx.danstoncul.net/
The only other reason I can see for him not being arrested is the fact that GSM is not a US owned technology. That and the fact that operators couldn't care less, it is not like they hold copyright over your conversations...
in many countries, GSM operators are required to turn encryption off.
"...instead of encrypting the conversation and then employing ECC, the GSM does it the other way...."
Well, that answers my question about whether the standard writers had their design reviewed by someone who understands cryptography. *sigh*
The elreg and reuters article are a bit low a technical details, somehow the israely ambasy of wasington has more covarage in english probably a translation of something. The university of haifa (where the research heaponed) links to this israely newspaper (in hebrew, registration req`ed).
This story isn`t only interesting becouse GSM is (and will be for many years to come) the most used standard. The most interesting aspect is that these vulnarabilities are not like the intentionaly broken crypto algorithems but are a stupid mistake in the implementation of systems for dealing with interference. according to one of the researchers: "At first, I didn't believe it. We checked it, and it was true."
Now for the tinfoil hat angle, is this yet another briliantly engineered "mistake" to make sure the crypto used keeps the customers feeling of privacy while maintaining the posibility of those with computing power to listen in or a honest screwup?
The full details will be in the patent these articles mention, the researchers apperantly wouldn`t mind marketing this trick to law enforcement groups.
I'm quite flattered that you wrote such a lengthy reply to my troll. It took about 3 minutes to write, and since posting it all over the place in the last couple of months, it has acquired hundreds of responses.
Still, your post is misinformed nonsense, but you can't help believing what your press says.
M
Yes. I will engage in oral intercourse with you for the exchange of monetary units.
Wahay! Well said. You know your stuff, but sadly Americans seem to believe the press and govt. more than reality.
Here in the UK, we're fed a lot of shit by the media and parliament, and we have problems too, but at least we keep an open mind.
Good to know that pretty much the whole world now seems to be on 3G, why else would the article speak of "legacy GSM handsets"?
I hear them referred to as Brittish foreign intelligence all the time.
Well you see, its one higher.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Is a kick ass car. Probably the finest sports sedan in the world. Please don't bring me those overpriced Merc monsters. They're pimp-moe-beels.
The M5 is an honest sports sedan.
Yes, I do have one, in fact.
I don't know, but I'm feeling that this is somewhat not true... If a cell phone processor can decrypt the code (not crack it!) so quick, how come a 2Ghz processor can't crack it? Advice for those of you who already area midway through the solution to this problem: Try locating the university's servers... []'s magu
I'm leaving! And I took the kids! You can keep the dog. Signed, Your Sig
America is invincible. Other countries will never advance any farther than America wishes them to advance.
Carthage was invicible until Rome turned up.
Rome was invincible until the 'barbarians' turned up.
The Inca were invincible until the Spanish turned up.
There is a proverb from Belarus - Keep one eye on the past and you are half blind. Forget the past altogether and you are totally blind.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
MI5 is the internal intelligence service MI6 is the external service Or effects to those words...
However, I am interested in what facts you have to back up your statement:
"Still, your post is misinformed nonsense, but you can't help believing what your press says."
I also will carry the burden of proof if you should decide to challenge me on any of my facts.
Sincerely,
David
P.S. -It only took me about 2 minutes to type that last post, I am a fast typist.
ControlBooth.com
Technical Theater Made Easy!
Interestingly enough, GSM crypto was designed by French 'military specialists', which has raised the usual (probably justified) suspicions of backdoors.
Not only that, but considering the historical precedent of the French in military conflicts, I'm surprised it puts in any effort what so ever.
Now, had the Germans designed it...
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
For USians, the roles equate as follows:
MI5 = FBI
MI6 = CIA
GCHQ = NSA
JIC = Senate Oversight Committee (*very* roughly)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
BTW, if you haven't already read this book & are even slightly interested in security, I can strongly recommend it. It covers everything from smart cards, nuclear command & control, radio monitoring, GSM, ATM & credit cards, biometrics, through to the standard encryption protocols & e-commerce.
here is your cookie...
Oh, and 3G calls to GSM mobiles are presumably still open...
10 points for cool Spinal Tap reference. :)
GSM is a published algorithm, is it not? As such, he wouldn't have to reverse-engineer anything. I don't believe the DMCA covers criticizing something that has an open spec. It's not his fault he's the only one who had the insight.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You say Israel has:
250 nuclear weapons that makes it a rival to China,
Later, after an amusing bit of zoology, you predict:
Which brings the question:
Why do you hate Israel's arab neighbours so ? If such a raving lunatic (as you say) with 250 nukes (as you claim) will self destruct (as you hope), won't it take its Arab neighbours with it ?
I would think every sane Arab should prey to Allah that Israel is never destroyed
Or is that kind of reasoning too difficult for you ?
Working for necessity's mother.
True, hopefully they'll act legally when dealing with domestic carriers, but internationally, it's a totally different story. No Chinese carrier is going to allow the US government to tap in. Heck, even British Telecom probably wouldn't let them... and even if they did, the US government would want to absolutely minimize the chance that the victim could find out about the tap -- and a good step towards that is keeping all information within their own organization (and not in the hands of a private or foreign-governement-owned phone carrier)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
CDMA is indeed tougher to demodulate than GSM, the reason being that each GSM signal uses the same carrier (basically it encodes bits by modulating phase; the technical term is Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying, or GMSK). CDMA, on the other hand, has each user use a different "spreading code" in an attempt to make signals from different users orthogonal. The purpose of the spreading code is to take your nice orderly stream of bits, and turn it into a random-looking sequence. At the other end, the receiver knows what sequence you're using, and it can undo this transformation. As a side effect, your code is chosen to try to be orthogonal to other people's codes, so that at the same time demodulating your signal nulls out other people's signals, so your interference is reduced.
The reason there's some security in this process is that if a 3rd party doesn't know your spreading code, they won't be able to demodulate your signal -- you're going to sound like so much noise to their receiver, even if they have the proper CDMA decoding hardware. Having said that, this "encryption" supposedly isn't difficult to crack; Phil Karn from Qualcomm posted a discussion on CDMA security to a crypto list about this a while back. Here's a snippet:
I remember hearing a lecture on CDMA where the professor described a favorite tactic of hackers being to hang out with scanners over bridges, where people's connections would cut out, and grab their codes when the phones tried to resync with the base stations as cars exited the tunnel.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
That 3G is probably not any safer and that in fact, this is a marketing move to add to people's "worry" and say "Gee, its time for a new phone anyway..."
Happens all the time. Same thing happened with the drug "Seldane" just as the patent was expiring...FDA came out with a new study "whoops, unsafe, must be pulled from market".
I don't even have a cell phone, let alone a 3G model :)
...you insensitive clod!
are all like postcards. This is not news. Folks have been doing this stuff, albiet with more gear to tote around, for some time.
the news here is that now everyone here could do it, given enough gumption and funding - because now you all can see how its done.
the other news here may be that many of you were too stupid in believing that if you were talking over a radio transmitter, that you couldn't be hacked into. If it transmits, it can be captured and heard. trust me on this one.
I'll be seeing you.. but you won't be seeing me...
-The Conspiracy
The report says you need to play man in the middle, the paper title claims cyper text only. Does anyone with the relevent background know which it is?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Does anyone know if its possible to make a device that exploits such a vulnerability?
I don't buy into the very difficult to exploit crap. As far as I can tell from this information (but IANAHE - im not a hardware engineer) it would be possible to design hardware that can systematically exploit this vulnerability and it would be a godsent for governments of countries with less than adequate constitutions and really handy to have for large companies who would like to hear what their competition has to say. It would be an extremely valuable device. Very difficult to exploit in practise, maybe, worth it to some? totally..
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
"I also will carry the burden of proof if you should decide to challenge me on any of my facts."
That's the thing. You didn't respond to the points made in the original post; instead, you meandered off with some irrelevant stats about the military. Having lots of weapons doesn't make your country better, son. But from the tone of your post, you do seem to be lapping up what the media and govt. tell you. America has huge problems - don't keep relying on military might.
"I am a fast typist."
But a slow thinker, evidently.
M
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
The GSM says the attack is difficult and expensive
to implement, I am not so sure.
I havn't read the papers my self but I do
discuss cryptology with Elad on a regular basis,
It is my understanig that besides the weakness
Elad found, they plan on using some time/memory/data
tradeoff to actually preform the attack.
The error correction code fiasco just elimenates
the need for some known plaintext(as was needed in
previos attack by Dunkekman(Who, epsalon you might
know had littleto do with this new attack).
If I understand things correctly, you need
significant computer power to get going, but
after your done preprocessing, also a very weak
cmputer with a cell-phone attached to it,
will be able to listen in on any call, easily.
I don't have numbers as to how easy is this
exactly.
I would recommend reading up, the following
article showen in crypto right after:
Making a faster time/memory tradeoff.
and another paper on
stream ciphers with low sampling rates.
This is what Elad has been reading up on,
probably has a lot to do with this attack.
seems to me the GSM are not being accurate.
Troll? Nope, just replying to the OP's myopic view of American 'invicibility.'
--
This sig is inoffensive.
It's "an anonymous tip"...
This guy is right.. I too have used a REMOB once.. we didn't have admin level rights on it though I think, so all we could do was generate tones and disconnect phones.. no listening, IIRC.. would love to have access to one of those again though ;) phreaking articles DO mention them though from time to time
During military service 1998-99 me and my fellow radio-operators listend to "encrypted" GSM calls in realtime. So whats the news? Decryption of GSM calls are easy to make with an average PC, we used something like PPro 200.
:-)
We got a couple of nice calls from fellow soldiers to there girlfriends.. xxx-rated radioshow
Or is that kind of reasoning too difficult for you ?
yeah I can see scores of israeli suicide bombers killing themselves for their fair and just cause...
when you figure out what drives people to blow themselves up you will discover that your logic is flawed, you people made them so desprate that life became worthless to them, and if the israeli crimes continue your nukes will not worth a shit infront of an army of men and women who will live free or die in their cause.
not intended as flamebate, But : So what your saying is, the US is a warmongering state out to impose its will on all other nations , who if they don't like it can either be bankupted (al la USSR ) invaded (al la Iraq, various small islands etc) Nuked (al la Japan)or Ignored (all other countries France etc). I think that more or less covers it, no wonder they won't sign the International War Crimes Treaty posted anon caouse i don't want a flame out on my home email acct!!!!!!!
The initial work didn't totally blow the system open and make on-the-air cracks easy, but it showed that the system was incompetently designed as well as deliberately weakened further, and was yet another reminder that Closed System Design is even worse in cryptography than in software. Subsequent work by people like Biham and Wagner keeps making it worse, and of course computer equipment keeps getting cheaper and larger, which means that attacks that need "hundreds of GB of disk" cost you $200 at Fry's rather than $200000 at the NSA Spook Equipment Shoppe.
In the US, GSM is still a security improvement, weak as it is, because the government bullied the digital cell phone system developers into using even weaker and more broken algorithms (back when they could pretend they were worried about Commie Spies rather than trying to facilitate illegal wiretapping.) (And of course analog cell phones didn't have crypto at all.) But even then, many of the cell phone companies don't bother turning on the crypto - Nokia phones give you a nice friendly indication that they tried to use it and got rejected.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
At great risk of sounding like the Voice of Reason (and God knows how Slashdotters hate that!), could you please present some evidence to back up your assertion that the United States and United Kingdom are colluding to break the laws of both nations?
Look up the Federal laws: if it is illegal for a Federal agency to do $foo, then it is also illegal for a Federal agency to have a third party do $foo on their behalf.
If I break into a home and see a kilo of cocaine lying around, I can then go to the DEA and tell them. They can use my testimony to get a warrant to search the home and impound the drugs. Why? Because I didn't commit the crime on their behalf; I came in entirely of my own accord; there was no understanding between the DEA and myself that "if I see any drugs, I'm going to bring them to your attention".
But if the DEA asks me to break into a home, they'd better damn well have a warrant, otherwise they're breaking all manner of Federal laws.
So what you're positing is there is a tacit understanding between the US and UK that each will spy on the other's citizens and share with each other the fruits of those actions. Hmm. This sounds mind-bogglingly stupid.
Why?
Free hint: this is a Federal crime.
Free hint number two: the FBI and NSA do not get along.
Free hint number three: the FBI is the one with the charter to spy on American citizens--not the NSA.
Free hint number four: the FBI protects its jurisdictional turf very zealously.
Free hint number five: the FBI is one of the nation's intelligence agencies, co-equal with the CIA and NSA. The FBI has no charter to collect intelligence from foreign sources; the CIA and NSA have no charter to collect intelligence from domestic sources.
Free hint number six: if the NSA were to really be involved in this, the FBI would be doing a full-court-press investigation into the matter. (a), because it's a clear and massive violation of Federal law, and more importantly, (b) THE FBI DOES NOT SHARE ITS JURISDICTIONAL TURF.
Period.
So if you have any hard facts proving this tacit agreement, I'd love to hear it. If you have hard facts about it, then I'll talk to my FBI friends tomorrow and tell them about it.
I guarantee you they'll be pissed off.
Stole your lawyers cell phone, hacked it in your "cell" and passed the codes on to your wife during a visit eh?
And you have the BALLS to beg to be set free after all this??!!
BAH! I think not!
-1, Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Does anyone have more information on this? Typically if you decrypt something which has errors, those errors become greatly magnified, and error correcting codes would have a very hard time fixing those errors. I'm wondering if the attack is exploiting something about the equalization training sequence and not so much error correcting codes.
If they are using a LFSR (linear feedback shift register), a popular circuit for generating pseudo-random bit sequences, it isn't secure. Simple LFSRs are trivial to crack.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
From what I remember, the design of the GSM A5 cipher was always suspected to be weak. From Applied Cryptography:
Bruce Schneier then goes on to say that "There is a trivial attack requiring 240 encryptions." 240 is only some 1 trillion, definitely in reach using today's computers.
Yeah, the NSA has already been doing it, you can be sure of that, and further rumors about GSM crypto that I've been hearing say that the NSA applied pressure on the French as well to insert deliberate weaknesses. Maybe Biham & Co. just managed to find out some of the NSA's "easter eggs".
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
This isn't an issue for cell phone users in the United States. There is no encryption on your calls. So you don't have to worry about someone cracking the lame algorithm. There are secure cell phones available for GSM and CDMA networks, but they don't sell them to the proles.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...and as I understood it, there are two main GSM ciphers in use, A5/1 which is "strong" and A5/2 which is "weak". Both have attacks, but the one mentioned in the article which is very fast and effective is only against A5/2. The A5/1 attacks are more theoretical in that they involve known plaintext, meaning you have to guess the exact bits which were encrypted for some portion of the conversation. Plus they take enormously more work.
Apparently A5/2 is mostly used in the Middle East, including Israel. These are the people most affected by the new break. European GSM uses A5/1 which is still basically safe, it will be much cheaper to tap the landlines for those users. It is the Israelis and other A5/2 users who are toast.
Bruce Schneier mentioned how weak the GSM algorithm was back in this Dec 99 issue of Crypto-Gram. Its lousy encrpytion and is secret, non-peer reviewed.
The subject of the surveillance then makes a phone call, but you don't know what number he is using - so your warrant with the Judges signature doesn't help much.
You may observe tge phone call but you can't get an intercept because even if you know the local BSE, it may be handling 16 calls simultaneously. Under such circumstancesm off air intercepts are the only simple solution. Even then you would need to determine which conversation you wanted (GSM uses TDMA to seperate calls on a particular frequency).
by Them.
AMPLITUDE INVERSION not turning wave upside down.
it was INVERTED so that noise was quiet and qiet was noise. amplitude inversion, not turning the wave upside down.
Try it on YOUR OWN computer. the post is 100% factual.
the purpose of the primitive garbling was to allow discerning between off-hook , modem, or in progress call.
remob is real
This is too rich, an Egyption anti-Israelly bigot, thinking that Israelies are snakes and wolves that should be dedstroyed, OTOH thinks that going to heaven is akin to dating Natalie Portman, a Jew and ex-Israely.
Is the lovely miss Portman your reason for being so uptight and hateful to Israelies ?
Or perhaps you are into female snakes and she-wolves ?
What is the document type dynamo-internal/html ? Is that some kind of windows-only horseshit?
You forgot:
MI2 = Very bad movie with Tom Cruise
Just remember that the rest of the world will see their true value, oil will start to be traded in Euros, then you'll have to hope the US internal economy is enough to keep you going, because you'll be fucked.
And you'd better get smarter, too - there's no way that a dumb bunch of assholes like you've got at the moment will be able to keep a siege economy going.
I can't believe this has made headline news on both /. and on NewScientist... This stuff has been going for years - I have a reliable German friend who know that the German Federal Police have had this knowledge and been using it publically. A temporary base station has been used before - the privacy issue (in Germany at least) is that even with a Judge appointed warrant all calls are captured at the same time while recording one call (unfortunate kickback I'm sure).
Interesting enough but it was touted by so many as such cutting edge news...
no but it shows tolerance you cant seem to understand.
actually Natalie thinks that arabs and israelis are cousins
"most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically."
parent post is kinda meaningless.
I learnd long ago that the best defense in this case is to go on the offense. So please tell me, why did the USA attacked british troops in Iraq? Why did it bombed well-marked Red Cross and UN buildings in Afganistan? And why did it destroyed an Iranian Airbus, killing 290 civilians?
And I have many more examples. So if all of those cases could be innocent mistakes, why couldn't the Liberty?
Not all the Russian hardware sucks. The Hinds are decent choppers and the Su-27 is a pretty good plane. The AK-47 is one of the best small arms invented. Also, from a non-military point of view their diesel locomotives also kick ass.
What happened to MI1 through 4? Or are they just not mentioned? And who says it stops at 6 -- what about MI7?
Kind of makes you wonder.
The cipher used is a stream cipher which XORs a keystream to the plaintext (plaintext with ECC applied). There is no error propagation, so the solution actually works. But the ECC is linear with respect to XOR so you can write equations that are independent of the actual plaintext encrypted. The details are in the paper, in the proceedings of Crypto 2003, LNCS 2729, Springer Verlag.
>So... yes, I do believe that in a non-nuclear fight, we would beat Europe, China, Russia, and India.
gaining what exactly - what would the point of such action be? or to expand further: why does the US feel it necessary to be *able* to 'beat' Europe, China, Russia, and India.
I'll wager 400 Quatloos on the AC.
CDMA, if I understand it correctly, doesn't just "hop" frequencies: it uses many frequencies simultaneously.
Each spreading code tells your phone which group of frequencies to use, and each bit of the audio stream is translated to a "chip", which is a pattern of bits on different frequencies. So when your phone broadcasts a 0 chip, it might actually send a 0 bit on frequencies X, Y, Z, and a 1 bit on frequencies A, B, C. (I'm simplifying here.. there are a lot more than 6 bits in a chip.) This is what allows for "soft handoffs" where your phone is talking to two towers at the same time: the other tower only needs to know your spreading code, it doesn't have to reserve a frequency/timeslot for you as in GSM.
Some codes use some of the same frequencies as other codes. Normally that isn't a problem, because there are enough frequencies that the tower can correct errors: if it sees a 0 on X, Y, Z, a 1 on A and B, and a 0 on C, it can decide that someone else is colliding with your C and that you really wanted to broadcast a 0 chip. A very busy cell will eventually get to a point where any extra users would cause too much interference for the phone and towers to correct those collisions, which is what causes CDMA's soft limit.
Because interference is such a key point in CDMA, the network controls everyone's broadcast power with an iron fist, to prevent users from interfering with each other or with other towers. This is useful for portable towers, among other things... the wireless carrier can put a tower in the back of a truck and park it near the stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, and the portable tower will make sure all the handsets are only using as much power as they need to reach the truck. Other towers in the area won't be overloaded by all the phone users in the stadium.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I can't remember any detail, but I believe that departments 1-4 operated during the second world war. Try Google.
MI5 is counter-intelligence, ie operating /within/ Britain to counter security/intelligence threats. MI5 were involved in efforts to counter IRA activity, as well as tapping most phone and other comms to Rep. of Ireland.
MI6 are intelligence, ie gathering intelligence on external parties. Equivalent of the US CIA.
Apparently they've changed their names, according to another poster.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.