Inaccurate study quoting, Re: anti-crypto rhetoric (Ellison,

[Casper Dik]

>About GSM
>
>On Tue, Apr 07, 1998 at 12:26:18PM +0100, Phillip Temple wrote:
>> users in 106 countries, over 1/4 billion by 2003. They are already using
>> secure crypto, with no government back-doors, designed to withstand
>> a sustained crypto attack. However...
>
>I don't know if you could describe A5 (GSM crypto algo) as "strong".
>
>http://chem.leeds.ac.uk/ICAMS/people/jon/a5.html
>
>I have been told, and you may want to treat this with a pinch of salt,
>that some of the US networks using PCN have the encryption turned
>off for performance reasons.


When talking to a police officer in Amsterdam, he needed to make
a phone call on his cell-phone.  Interestingly, he used a Nokia 9000i,
so we got to be talking phones/GSM, among the things he said that 
attracted my attention were:

	- Eavesdropping GSM isn't all that hard (and when asked for
	  clarification, he seemed to indicate that he wasn't talking about
	  microwave links or exchange based interceptions)
	  Or perhaps we don't use encryption for GSM in the Netherlands?

	- The NOKIA had been modified for secure point-to-point
	  communication (complete with self-destruct on two wrong
	  password tries; separate from the phone's PIN, it appeared.

If GSM crypto isn't good enough for the police, it isn't good enough for
any of us.

Casper