Code breakers crack GSM cellphone encryption
David Wagner
daw at mozart.cs.berkeley.edu
Tue Sep 9 13:14:21 EDT 2003
Vin McLellan wrote:
>A5/2 was the equivalent of 40-bit DES, presumed to be relatively weak and
>developed as an export standard.
Yeah. Except it would be more accurate to place A5/2's strength as
roughly equivalent to 17-bit DES. A5/1's strength is roughly equivalent
to that of 40-bit DES.
Of course, the GSM folks didn't exactly do a great job of disclosing
these facts. They did disclose that A5/2 was the exportable version.
However, when A5/2 was first designed, SAGE put out a report that claimed
years of security analysis on A5/2 had been done and no mathematical
weaknesses had been found. Now that we've seen A5/2, that report suffers
from a certain credibility gap, to put it mildly...
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