4 ms·

wrt GSM the grapevine lore is that three-letter agencies lobbied for the encryption to be weak.

• Sesse__ 2y ago
  Note that this applies to A5/2; the stronger A5/1 took much longer to break, and this is an attack on A5/3 which was backported from 3G (UMTS) to GSM/GPRS.
  • ttyprintk 2y ago
    But A5/2 and 1 shared the same key generation, leading to an attack replaying the recorded, encrypted stream.
• Aerbil313 2y ago
  It's not lore, it's a fact: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html Most definitely still ongoing looking at history.
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    > . Could a public encryption standard be made secure enough to protect against everything but a massive brute force attack, but weak enough to still permit an attack of some nature using very sophisticated (and expensive) techniques? And this, I believe, is the main reason crypto algorithms are usually broken after 20 years. They were designed to be breakable with very expensive tech, and over time that tech gets cheaper and 20 years later it's within reach of phd students and it gets broken. If it weren't designed with deliberate weakness, some crypto might still have design or implementation flaws, but the majority would last thousands of years since the underlying math its based on doesn't suddenly get weaker.
• yencabulator 2y ago
  That was publicly and openly stated by a Nokia researcher during a local university guest lecture in the late 90s. He also strongly implied that wired traffic between base stations was specified to be plaintext for easy wiretapping.
  • SSLy 2y ago
    It's all TLS nowadays :^]