Now you, too, can engage in warrantless wiretapping!
David Hulton and Steve Muller demonstrated a new technique for cracking the encryption used to prevent eavesdropping on global system for mobile communications (GSM) cellular signals, the type of radio frequency coding used by major cellular service providers including AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile. Combined with a radio receiver, the pair say their technique allows an eavesdropper to record a conversation on these networks from miles away and decode it in about half an hour with just $1,000 in computer storage and processing equipment.Link (thanks, JGB!)Hulton, director of applications for the high-performance computing company Pico, and Muller, a researcher for mobile security firm CellCrypt, plan to make their decryption method free and public. In March, however, they say they'll start selling a faster version that can crack GSM encryption in just 30 seconds, charging between $200,000 and $500,000 for the premium version.
Who will be the customers for their innovative espionage technique? Hulton and Muller say they aren't sure yet. But they plan to offer the method to companies that will integrate it with radio technology, not sell it directly to the law enforcement and criminal customers who will undoubtedly be interested in putting it to use. "We're not creating the technology that does the interception," Muller says. "All this does is crunch data."
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Sigh. We can call these phones anything you want: Cell phones, Wireless, PCS, whatever. It is still just a fancy radio.
It's a RADIO, people! It broadcasts and it receives! So someone figured out how to listen to one. Gee. I did that for years before it was made illegal by the ignorant Electronics Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) in 1996.
That legislation was a classic example of technological ignorance. The paradigm ECPA replaced was called Radio Secrecy. It was the foundation for a very well conceived section in the Communications Act of 1934.
Radio Secrecy recognized that we can't easily control where a radio signal may be received. Thus anyone can receive anything, but if they profit from or use that signal without permission of both parties, it is illegal.
This is yet another anti-techie abomination. If you wonder why kids aren't interested in technical subjects such as radio, you have only to read crap-weasel legislation such as the ECPA.
I can only conclude that if Congress feels stupid, they'll make sure that nobody else will want to be smarter.
Actually it was at Shmocon and they were using very specialized hardware to crack the encryption keys. They estimated it would take three months to compute the rainbow tables to crack the keys. So its not likely that your friendly neighbor hacker is going to listen into to your calls.
divide up the work and calculate the tables with your botnet
It's not like we didn't know it would happen. In a world where security is nothing but a challenge for crackers, I always count on them winning. It is, after all, just a game to win.
Won't the cell companies slam DMCA down on these folks?
Any crypto that can be broken should be broken and the method of decryption released widely.
Instead of fixing their security hole(s), Our Corporate Masters (TM) will try to sue an exploit out of existence so only criminals and law enforcement will have access to our conversations.
How soon until this is implemented in software-defined GNU Radio for anyone to try out?
Oh, and if you were really worried about voice privacy, you would use Zfone (ZRTP) or some other end-to-end encryption.
Why doesn't someone implement this feature for the iPhone??? ...if the iPhone is just running OSX afterall. or as a standard component of Google Android.
I used to work at a place where we had a bunch of police & emergency scanners all going at once, and those picked up a LOT of cell phone conversations. Some of those folks would have just DIED if they knew we were listening in on their porn calls.
Another company has already pantented this, I believe. Ever heard of Kingfish?
#9 probably just worked at an electronics store.