The difference is that they completed the computation of the rainbow tables, which are required to make this attack practical, and made them public (although th

The difference is that they completed the computation of the rainbow tables, which are required to make this attack practical, and made them public (although the webserver with the torrent files is currently down: http://reflextor.com/torrents/ http://reflextor.com/torrents/). Of course theoretically this attack is known for quite some time, but making it practical by providing the equipment and rainbow tables is new. Interesting enough they planned to do a workshop today, where you could bring your GSM data and they wanted to try to decrypt it. However, due to legal reasons they had to cancel it (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/The_demonstration_is_canceled http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/The_demonstration_is...).