"GSM is as insecure as Wi-Fi was ten years ago," Nohl, who is chief scientist at Berlin-based Security Research Labs, told The Register. "It will be attacked by the same 'war-driving' script kiddies soon. Any discussion over whether the attacks available in the community are incomplete or impractical should have been put to rest with the last demonstration so that we can now start discussing how to fix the networks."
GSM is the most widely used mobile phone technology. It connects more than 5 billion phones, according to the GSMA. In the US, it's used by AT&T and T-Mobile. It's used by all major carriers in the UK.
The revised attack uses home-brewed firmware to turn the Motorola phones into wire-tapping devices that pull conversations and text messages off of a carrier's base station. They are connected to a PC that has access to a 2TB rainbow table used to decrypt messages protected by the decades-old A5/1 algorithm. H-online.com and Wired.com have more technical details here and here. Slides from the presentation are here
No comments:
Post a Comment