Friday, October 29, 2010

Researcher Releases Phone Call Eavesdropping Software

A security researcher has released open source software that can be used to record and decrypt communications passing over 2G GSM networks. Unlike other available solutions, that require very expensive set-ups, this free set of tools can work on off-the-shelf equipment.

The software was demoed at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas by Karsten Nohl, a security researcher who specializes in probing GSM security. His previous research focused on the A5/1 stream cipher used to encrypt GSM communications.

This cipher dates back to 1987 and is still widely used in Europe and the United States, despite being reverse-engineered in 1999. GSM operators have began adopting the more secure A5/3 cipher, which is used to encrypt traffic passing over 3G networks. However, when 3G coverage is not available, phones drop back to the insecure 2G standard.

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