Jaap-Henk Hoepman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Any tap on the GSM cell phone will _not_ be on the encrypted over-the-air
>>interface but simply on the plaintext leaving the base station on the fixed
>>network.
Legal wiretaps on cellphones might tap at the base station,
but illegal wiretaps may be mostly over-the-air.
(It's possible that those won't be included in the official count:-)
However, legal wiretaps can attempt to use over-the-air as well,
especially in the US, and they will probably report encryption there.
Of course, as the GSM folks told Lucky and Ian, it's simply not possible
to crack GSM A5/1 phones in a purely over-the-air attack....
In reality it might still be too difficult for the average
police department to crack. In the US, GSM is rare;
analog and unencrypted digital are the most common formats,
and the standard digital encryption is far weaker than GSM -
the radio effort to follow CDMA or TDMA is more work than the crypto.
At 09:18 PM 05/07/2000 -0400, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
>According to the White House press release the test was "encountered
>encryption" and they could well have counted GSM even if they could
>get around the encryption as you describe. Declan points out that the
>law was worded more carefully than the press release, so things are
>not as bad as I feared. Point for Congress.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
