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Feds' Radios Have Significant Security Flaws
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal has a story describing how the portable radios used by many federal law enforcement agents have major security flaws that allow for easy eavesdropping and jamming. Details are in a new study being released today (PDF). The authors of the study were able to intercept hundreds of hours of sensitive traffic inadvertently sent without encryption over the past two years. They also describe how a texting toy targeted at teenage girls can be modified to jam transmissions from the affected radios, either encrypted or not."
Apparently, aside from user interface failings, the system is based on manual keyfill and pre-shared keys...
And I'm not talking "Man, I hate trusting CA certs" pre-shared keys, I'm talking "Apparently, news of assymetric key cryptography hasn't made it to P25 land yet, and we have no option but to talk in the clear unless everybody we are talking to has been keyfilled ahead of time. Oh, also, none of our radios provide any warning when receiving a cleartext signal, they just decode and play exactly the same as if it were encrypted... We are deliberately ignoring everything that has been learned about maintaining encrypted channels under real world conditions here, apparently!"