80% of Cell Phone Encryption Solutions Insecure

An anonymous reader writes "Mobile Magazine writes about a blogger named Notrax who has tested 15 methods of secure encryption for mobile phones; out of those he found only 3 could not be cracked at some level. '12 of them were "worthless." It's easy to take the software at face value when it "tells you" that the call is secured. But how does someone actually go about being sure that it is secured? Notrax did some digging and discovered he could break in to almost all of them in under 30 minutes.'" (Above link is to a slightly older description of Notrax's approach; then, it was 9 out of 10 products that were worthless, instead of 12 out of 15.)

Comments

yeah, i can hear you now.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, i can hear you now.

Re:yeah, i can hear you now.

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT? SPEAK UP!

The solution

[ascari]

Earlyclay itway isway upway otay ethay userway otay useway omesay otherway ormfay ofway obfuscationway

Re:The solution

[sexconker]

V fcrnx va ebg 13. Gbgny frphevgl.

My mother's a frphevgl, you insensitive khdfsji!

I speak in code

[Monkeedude1212]

It's so efficient, not even my recipient can make out what I mean.

The Missile from France went down my pants, so I need you to dance and prance
"Are you breaking up with me?"

Sure, if you install the spy software.

[InlawBiker]

This tactic requires you to install software on the target's phone without their knowledge. That doesn't render the encryption faulty, it's just stealing the voice signal before it gets encrypted. I like this part from the vendor's web site: "$PRODUCT_NAME for iPhone is professional grade spy phone software that takes minutes to install on a jailbroken iPhone, and instantly starts sending data to a secure web account where you can log in and view records..."

Re:What's that?

[MachDelta]

Honest men can be found everywhere.

Honest politicians? SETI is still working on that one.

Re:Nothing to see here, move along

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while.

Now that my antivirus found a trojan, it's no longer a trojan?

Re:Just 80%?

[Bengie]

It would take more energy to break a current day 256bit symmetric key than there is usable energy in our galaxy. A near perfect 256bit would require you breaking down all of the stars in the universe into pure energy to break one key. Have fun.

but yes, human factor. ignore the key all together.

Re:Backdoors != news

[Narnie]

Yeah, I've seen that too, but I can't remember the name of the movie.