This past week there was the Chaos Communication Congress, which was a four-day computer hackers’ conference. At this congress, an encryption specialist, Karsten Nohl, discussed how he and about 24 other people cracked the code. He also said the two terabyte code book, that could theoretically be used to decipher GSM phone calls, is available on various BitTorrent websites.
Is it time to worry if you have GSM? Only time will tell. Different security experts say different things.
The telephone companies are proclaiming that the A5/1 algorithm, a 64-bit binary code, will soon be phased out for its successor, the 128-bit A5/3 algorithm, and that even just a simple modification to the existing code would be enough to thwart any attempts to intercept calls.
Some security experts on the other hand are saying that the “hardware and software needed for digital surveillance were available free as an open-source product” and that this new development could “reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours.”
So who do you believe? If the older technology will be phased out, how soon will it happen? GSM is used worldwide and has a much larger user base than CDMA, so how many people will this effect?
Source: Gizmodo (Thanks for the tip John Norman)