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To: Bux who wrote (3972)	12/6/1999 5:21:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Cell Phone Crypto Penetrated by Declan McCullagh 10:55 a.m. 6.Dec.1999 PST Israeli researchers have discovered design flaws that allow the descrambling of supposedly private conversations carried by hundreds of millions of wireless phones. Alex Biryukov and Adi Shamir describe in a paper to be published this week how a PC with 128 MB RAM and large hard drives can penetrate the security of a phone call or data transmission in less than one second. More Infostructure in Wired News Read more about Gadgets and Gizmos Check back with Wired News for continuing coverage Read more Politics -- from Wired News Read more Technology -- from Wired News The flawed algorithm appears in digital GSM phones made by companies such as Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens, and used by well over 100 million customers in Europe and the United States. Recent estimates say there are over 230 million users worldwide who account for 65 percent of the digital wireless market. Although the paper describes how the GSM scrambling algorithm can be deciphered if a call is intercepted, plucking a transmission from the air is not yet practical for individuals to do. James Moran, the fraud and security director of the GSM Association in Dublin, says that "nowhere in the world has it been demonstrated --an ability to intercept a call on the GSM network. That's a fact.... To our knowledge there's no hardware capable of intercepting." The GSM Association, an industry group, touts the standards as "designed to conform to the most stringent standards of security possible from the outset [and] unchallenged as the world's most secure public digital wireless system." Not any more. Shamir says the paper he co-authored with a Weizmann Institute of Science colleague in Rehovot, Israel, describes a successful attack on the A5/1 algorithm, which is used for GSM voice and data confidentiality. It builds on the results of previous attempts to attack the cipher. "It's quite a complex idea, in which we fight on many fronts to accumulate several small improvements which together make a big difference, so the paper is not easy to read or write," Shamir, a co-inventor of the RSA public key crypto system in 1977, said in an email to Wired News.

To: Bux who wrote (3972)	12/6/1999 5:23:00 PM
From: Kayaker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Wireless: Victim of its own success This plus what the Nortel exec was saying a few weeks ago keeps me skeptical about HDR. Message 11856729 So, it stills looks to me that HDR is going to be hard to sell to operators. I realize the overload in voice (that your article described) may be more basestation/infrastructure related than lack of spectrum, but I can't see why operators would be willing/able to free up spectrum for HDR. Networks are overloaded doing voice alone, and demand will skyrocket with 1XRTT and 384k data (even though 1XRTT doubles capacity, and the eventual demise of AMPS frees up more.) Pardon if I sound like a broken record. Not that I worry about Q (or my Q stock). This overload in voice makes CDMA all the more attractive because of its efficiencies and improved quality vs GSM/TDMA.