Breaking GSM With a $15 Phone Plus Smarts (Wired) [LWN.net]

Wired's Threat Level blog looks at a GSM cellphone eavesdropping demonstration made at the recent Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin. "As part of this background communication, GSM networks send out strings of identifying information, as well as essentially empty "Are you there?" messages. Empty space in these messages is filled with buffer bytes. Although a new GSM standard was put in place several years ago to turn these buffers into random bytes, they in fact remain largely identical today, under a much older standard. [...] This allows the researchers to predict with a high degree of probability the plain-text content of these encrypted system messages. This, combined with a two-terabyte table of precomputed encryption keys (a so-called rainbow table), allows a cracking program to discover the secret key to the sessions encryption in about 20 seconds."

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