NSA Able To Crack A5/1 Cellphone Crypto

jones_supa writes "The most widely used cellphone encryption cipher A5/1 can be easily defeated by the National Security Agency, an internal document shows. This gives the agency the means to intercept most of the billions of calls and texts that travel over radiowaves every day, even when the agency would not have the encryption key. Encryption experts have long known the cipher to be weak and have urged providers to upgrade to newer systems. Consequently it is also suggested that other nations likely have the same cracking capability through their own intelligence services. The vulnerability outlined in the NSA document concerns encryption developed in the 1980s but still used widely by cellphones that rely on 2G GSM. It is unclear if the agency may also be able to decode newer forms of encryption, such as those covered under CDMA."

Comments

Hysterics

[squiggleslash]

1. A5/1 is the "insecure, intended for export" cipher. Any US or European operator that uses it is not following recommendations.
2. It was cracked in the early 1990s. It would be bizarre if the NSA didn't know how to read it. Like I said, it was never intended to be secure by its creators. As in - GCHQ, the NSA's UK ally, has ALWAYS known how to crack it.
3. One problem with intercepting a GSM mobile call would be dealing with the fact that, as soon as you move away from the transmitting device, you're having to deal with interference from neighboring cells. Which is why any intelligence agency worth its salt isn't going to do that terribly often. What they'd do is install the tap on the operator's network.

So, in short, this article is claiming the NSA "can do" something, but only in non-Western countries, that it's unlikely to need to do given the fact the alternatives are way easier, and that we know it "can do" anyway, and knew it in the mid-1990s, and probably figured it could do right from the beginning given the close relationship between the NSA and CCHQ. This is news... why?