Cell phone eavesdropping enters script-kiddie phase
Are you phone call’s still private?
Black Hat Independent researchers have made good on a promise to release a comprehensive set of tools needed to eavesdrop on cell phone calls that use the world’s most widely deployed mobile technology.
“The whole topic of GSM hacking now enters the script-kiddie stage, similar to Wi-Fi hacking a couple years ago, where people started cracking the neighbor’s Wi-Fi,” said Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer with the Security Research Labs in Berlin who helped spearhead the project. “Just as with Wi-Fi, where they changed the encryption to WPA, hopefully that will happen with GSM, too.”
Article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/cell_phone_snooping/
The suite of applications now includes Kraken, software being released at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday that can deduce the secret key encrypting SMS messages and voice conversations in as little as 30 seconds. It was developed by Frank A. Stevenson, the same Norwegian programmer who almost a decade ago developed software that cracked the CSS encryption scheme protecting DVDs.
It has been designed to work seamlessly with 1.7TB worth of rainbow tables that are used to crack A5/1, a decades-old encryption algorithm used to protect cell phone communications using GSM, which is used by about 80 percent of the world’s mobile operators. A small confederation of researchers announced last year they were setting out to create the voluminous index, which exploits known weaknesses in the encryption formula.
Thoughts and Questions on this fellow bloggers?
~WizZ
HackTalk Security Team
Article By Jack Burdett
Love's Security And Coding Related Things, is a fast learner, and is always willing to help!
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