Germany Frees Crypto

[Phillip Temple]

At 12:43 PM 6/4/99 +0300, Putrefied Cow wrote:
>
>BTW, A long time ago in Finland, I remember reading that the GSM
>phones could have had strong enough crypto that the NSA couldn't
>crack it, and that because of it the UKUSA forced Nokia's hand and
>made them adopt a weak crypto that is easily cracked.
>
>So essentially now every GSM phone is insecure as they can be
>listened into from spy-satellites.

The original specs for GSM had strong crypto. From the previous
discussions I remember, it was rather a case of different national
interests having different agendas re: eavesdropping. I don't think
it applied to any one manufacturer, it was rather across the board.
Hence handsets sold to different nations had different levels of
being crippled (by blanking xxx of the top bits of the key). There
was also the story of the Sicily Mafia buying German mobile
phones to stop the Italian law enforcement from listening in.

I'm sure someone can come up with more accurate details than
my vague recollections. The UKUSA alliance probably also had
a hand in these dealings?

Phillip.