UMTS

Posted Jan 7, 2010 15:12 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: UMTS by bojan
Parent article: GSM encryption crack made public

Alas, no.

That might be possible with *content-layer* encryption, but the topic being discussed here is air-interface link-layer encryption -- without that, you might be able to keep your content private, but traffic analysis will still be possible... and that's often more useful anyway.

UMTS

Posted Jan 7, 2010 22:00 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, I get that. Maybe it's time the devices (being more and more smartphones, with sufficient amount of grunt) get redesigned so that link layer encryption can change cyphers at will as well.

UMTS

Posted Jan 8, 2010 2:18 UTC (Fri) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link] (1 responses)

thats done in the baseband chip, generally a separate ARM in a sealed env that talks to the grunt processor over uarts or something similiar.

these chips generally don't have the grunt to keep multple firmwares installed.

UMTS

Posted Jan 8, 2010 2:58 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yeah, I get that too. Maybe it's time this gets changed so that all the processing power and flexibility available can be utilised in order to change cyphers on the fly. Ergo, my redesigned comment.