Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>At 22:36 12/5/1999 -0500, Matt Blaze forwarded:
>>Real-Time Cryptanalysis of GSM's A5/1 on a PC
>>
>>Alex Biryukov and Adi Shamir
>>Computer Science Department
>>The Weizmann Institute
>>Rehovot 76100, Israel
>Thanks, Matt, for forwarding. My article, with the no-interception-possible
>response from the GSM folks, is at:
>
> http://wired.lycos.com/news/politics/0,1283,32900,00.html
Quoting from the article:
>James Moran, the fraud and security director of the GSM Association in Dublin,
>says that "nowhere in the world has it been demonstrated --an ability to
>intercept a call on the GSM network. That's a fact.... To our knowledge
>there's no hardware capable of intercepting."
Given that there are a number of companies who sell GSM interception gear (and
who have been selling it for quite some time, several used to advertise it
quite openly on the web), this security director is, to take a line from the
Deep Crack book, "either lying, or incompetent, or both". It's interesting to
note that all the vendors who advertised their stuff online have now restricted
access, presumably to maintain the myth that "there's no hardware capable of
intercepting" (aka security by Ostrich Algorithm :-).
Peter.
