Germany Frees Crypto

[Michael Bacon]

On Friday, June 04, 1999 3:15 PM, Phillip Temple 
[SMTP:ptemple@onlinemagic.com] wrote:
> 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.

Unless there has been a recent change, I believe that the French cellular 
system doesnot use crypto.  This poses the interesting issue of making a 
call in Basle with roaming enabled.  The cell-phone is (roughly) equally 
likely to logon to (at random) a French, a German or a Swiss network - with 
varying degrees of protection.

Michael (Streaky) Bacon