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Open Source Attempt To Crack GSM Encryption

Posted by timothy on from the phone-you-break-could-be-your-own dept.

Lexta writes with an interesting tidbit from IEEE Spectrum: "'Karsten Nohl, chief research scientist with H4RDW4RE, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security research firm, is mounting what could be the most ambitious attempt yet to compromise the GSM phone system.' The intended approach is to create an open source project to spread the computation of a giant look-up table across more than 80 machines. Interestingly, they've openly stated that nVidia's CUDA technology will be used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPUs as well."

3 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Big deal by Rob+Kaper · · Score: 3, Funny

    Big deal. No one still uses their cellphone to make calls anyway.

  2. Re:Incorrect time estimate? BOINC? by baffler86 · · Score: 3, Funny

    This should definitely be done on public school computers. Free computing to the user and a tried and true method of distributed computing.

  3. Re:donate by Arthur+Grumbine · · Score: 4, Funny

    Link to the project web-site: http://wiki.thc.org/gsm

    Inexplicably, that link makes me think of weed and sex. I expect a high turnout of volunteers at the college level.

    --
    Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.