Close
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
Read Down
Sign in
Close
Welcome!Log into your account
Forgot your password?
Read Down
Password recovery
Recover your password
Close
Search
Menu
Search
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
More
    Home Applications
    • Applications
    • Cybersecurity
    • Development
    • Mobile

    Low-Cost Attack on GSM Encryption Demoed

    By
    Ryan Naraine
    -
    February 20, 2008
    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Linkedin

      WASHINGTON – A pair of security researchers have developed a way to use $1,000 worth of off-the-shelf hardware to receive and decipher GSM signals, significantly reducing the time it takes to eavesdrop on conversations on the world’s largest mobile phone network.
      The technology was introduced Feb. 20 at the Black Hat DC Briefings here by David Hulton and Steve Miller, two wireless security experts who claim they are the first to implement a low-cost practical attack against A5/1, the cipher used to protect the privacy of GSM cell phone calls.
      “GSM is not secure. It’s a big network with base stations all over the place. Our goal is to raise awareness and to motivate the mobile industry to secure the network,” Hulton said.
      Hulton, who is best known for his work on 802.11b penetration testing and auditing tools, warned that the reduction in cost and time to crack GSM encryption technology could lead to a rise in data and identity theft attacks, with malicious hackers eavesdropping on cell phone calls and tracking the location of mobile phone users.
      He teamed up with Miller on stage to demo the “fully passive” technique, which uses a combination of the TMTO (Time-Memory Trade Off) or Rainbow Table attack and some other tricks.
      “One of the tricks that we use to compute such a large table is by implementing the Rainbow Table generation and real-time attack on FPGAs. This reduced our time drastically. On a single PC it would take roughly 33,000 years to compute the table or would take 33,000 PCs one year. With a moderate 4U cluster of 68 FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays], we can do it in three months,” he said.
      Hulton, the co-founder of Pico Computing, a manufacturer of compact embedded FPGA computers, said his company is developing new hardware to speed this up and make the attack more cost effective.
      “The time to crack it comes down to money,” he said.
      According to Hulton and Miller, an attacker with access to six 350GB hard drives (2TB) and one FPGA can easily recover the key of a GSM conversation (voice or sms/text) in less than 30 minutes.
      “The speed is proportional to the hard drive access time and the number of FPGAs. For the cheap attack to work twice as fast, it would require twice the number of hard drives and twice the number of FPGAs,” he said.
      It is not the first time that the A5/1 stream cipher came under the scrutiny of security researchers but, before now, realistic attacks required about $1 million in equipment, Hulton said.
      He also used his presentation to detail several security holes in the GSM standard, warning that only the air part of a GSM communication is encrypted. “The signal is decrypted at the base station and then transmitted in clear text across the network,” he said, noting that the encryption on the air part was broken in 1998.

      Avatar
      Ryan Naraine

      MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

      Android

      Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro: Durability for Tough...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 5, 2020 0
      Have you ever dropped your phone, winced and felt the pain as it hit the sidewalk? Either the screen splintered like a windshield being...
      Read more
      Cloud

      Why Data Security Will Face Even Harsher...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 1, 2020 0
      Who would know more about details of the hacking process than an actual former career hacker? And who wants to understand all they can...
      Read more
      Cybersecurity

      How Veritas Is Shining a Light Into...

      eWEEK EDITORS - September 25, 2020 0
      Protecting data has always been one of the most important tasks in all of IT, yet as more companies become data companies at the...
      Read more
      Big Data and Analytics

      How NVIDIA A100 Station Brings Data Center...

      Zeus Kerravala - November 18, 2020 0
      There’s little debate that graphics processor unit manufacturer NVIDIA is the de facto standard when it comes to providing silicon to power machine learning...
      Read more
      Apple

      Why iPhone 12 Pro Makes Sense for...

      Wayne Rash - November 26, 2020 0
      If you’ve been watching the Apple commercials for the past three weeks, you already know what the company thinks will happen if you buy...
      Read more
      eWeek


      Contact Us | About | Sitemap

      Facebook
      Linkedin
      RSS
      Twitter
      Youtube

      Property of TechnologyAdvice.
      Terms of Service | Privacy Notice | Advertise | California - Do Not Sell My Information

      © 2021 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

      Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

      ×