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Cell Phone Encryption Exploit Demonstrated
Saxophonist brings us a story from Forbes about security researchers who demonstrated a new method for breaking the encryption on GSM cellular signals. The presentation was made at the recent Black Hat conference, and it's notable for the fact that the technique only requires "about half an hour with just $1,000 in computer storage and processing equipment." The researchers also claim to have found a faster method, which they intend to market for $200,000 - $500,000. Quoting:
"Undetectable, 'passive' systems like the one that Muller and Hulton have created aren't new either, though previous technologies required about a million dollars worth of hardware and used a "brute force" tactic that tried 33 million times as many passwords to decrypt a cell signal. All of that means, Hulton and Muller argue, that their cheaper technique is simply drawing needed attention to a problem that mobile carriers have long ignored--one that well-financed eavesdroppers may have been exploiting for years. 'If governments or other people with millions of dollars can listen to your conversations right now, why shouldn't your next-door neighbor?' Muller says."
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
There are stories like this all the time, but tech people still have trouble convincing most users that end-to-end encryption is important. How is it that it caught on for the web (credit card payments over SSL), but still barely for personal communications (gpg, encrypted IM)? Even in the situations where it's easy to use encryption, many users still can't be made to care -- especially if it's not something enabled by default. Maybe just that those doing the sniffing are suitably quiet about it...
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Electronics kits for the digital generation.
and i'll bet they won't charge anything.
;)
check out some movie about the GSM state of security [1] and mod me informative.
[1] http://chaosradio.ccc.de/camp2007_m4v_2015.html
knowledge of this can *only* have some impact if you tell everyone about it. just look WEP, better encryption is the way to go.
Unless their patent application is kept confidential by the government for reasons of national security, it will be published within 18 months. You'll be able to learn how the trick works from it (if you're an expert in the field and you cannot make it work, no patent should be granted). You're not allowed to exploit that commercially, of course, but at least you can have fun and pull a few pranks with it. You could claim you're psychic.
I'm wondering how you ever could tune in to the correct conversation, with thousands of mobile phones transmitting at the same time.
Bert
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
It's really a matter of publicizing the weakness to the point where manufacturers and network providers are forced to do something about it. Average people generally don't care about issues like this until they're really an issue.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
My first thought about this was privacy and the government. Obviously.
From my understanding though, this encryption is certainly not applied over the whole transmission, meaning endpoint to endpoint. Just the handset to the tower.
The government does not actually need to crack this encryption, or even intercept transmission between handsets and towers. They can just order digital wiretaps, which cannot be detected. Speaking of which, I have always been amused when people state they you can just buy hardware to detect that too. The location of the handset is easily determined, and in most cases the identity of the user. The government already has the ability to access all of this information with the cooperation of the telecommunications companies anyways. With Telco Immunity being pushed, there won't even be room to dispute it anymore.
So not trivializing the serious issues with our privacy and the government, they are still the least of our concern here.
What strikes me as very problematic is that this opens up a whole new "market" for identity theft, banking fraud, etc. I do quite a lot of business over the phone, and just about every single company uses the touch tones to gather data. Capturing the the numbers by listening to the tones is trivial. This can be done quite easily by software and hardware.
So if all the popular company phone numbers are known, and all the data being sent to it by customers can be recorded, this presents quite a security problem. With the right amount of equipment you can start capturing all sorts of data being sent over the phone. It will only be a matter of time before you gain enough information to compromise someones identity.
I am not worried about my neighbors, not worried about my government, but I am very worried about the stranger interested in the fact I called Washington Mutual.
Newsflash - most of the world outside the US uses GSM.
New GSM equipment already supports A5/3 which is still secure. I think the main impact of this hack is going to be some sensational headlines and a big push to make A5/3 universally available.
message to your significant other: if he ever uses a non-gsm phone get the frying pan :)
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