GSM eavesdropping

[Frank A. Stevenson]

On Mon, 2010-08-02 at 11:02 -0400, Bill Squier wrote:
> "...In his presentation at the Black Hat Conference, German GSM expert Karsten Nohl presented a tool he calls Kraken, which he claims can crack the A5/1 encryption used for cell phone calls within seconds."
> 
> http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Quickly-decrypting-cell-phone-calls-1048850.html
> 

A quick list of bullet points on what is new here:

* 2TB (1.7 compressed) of GSM A5/1 rainbow tables have been created
* These tables leverage the fact that A5/1 suffers from "keyspace
convergence". After the initial 100 warm-up clockings, only 16% of the
keyspace remains valid.
* The rainbow tables only sample the converged space, such samples are
equivalent to sampling all of the on average 13 initial states that
converge to the sampled point.
* Efficient ATI GPU code has been written, that allowed us to compute
the tables in 8 "GPU months", and were effectively completed in just 4
weeks, using 4 computers and 850kWh of power.
* Depending on the random access speed of the storage medium, 64 bits
keys for a particular conversation can be cracked in minutes or seconds.
* We have made all software and the tables freely available.

Frank A. Stevenson


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