Why "carnivore" type systems can't be (entirely) open source

[Owen Lewis]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Gladman" <brg@gladman.plus.com>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: 08 February 2001 15:47
Subject: Re: Why "carnivore" type systems can't be (entirely) open source


> > In the case of GSM, the cipher + STO held up for very nearly the
required
> > time; close enough not to matter and to be counted a success, IMO, given
> the limited purpose for which it was only intended.
>
> My contention is that you do not know the minimum time that it 'held up'
> for.  All that you know is the maximum time - that is the time at which
the
> weakness became public knowledge.

My turn to duck :-)

But by inference the market for a decoding unit was always quite small.
Taking the intercept en claire or spoofing as a base station would cope with
most demand. The tasks that those methods could not satisfy were left
hungry.

> > > It was the communications functionality that that made GSM a success.
It
> > > seems to me extremely unlikely that its security (or lack of it) had
any
> > > significant impact on its success one way or the other.
> >
> > Which aspects of functionality had you in mind?
>
> Cost effective and convenient mobile communications available within a
wide
> geographic scope (from a single handset?).

But GSM did not have that when the mass migration occurred and, even now, it
remains a minority use though growing use. Roaming facility was introduced
only after the GSM was clearly here to stay. At the outset, GSM had two
marked advantages and one disadvantage vs TACS:

        -    It gave privacy and much better security against fraud.

        -    It was more prone to comms loss.

People moved for the perceived advantages, grumbling about the frequency of
lost calls . The companies worked hard to disfigure our landscape by
reducing cell size and improve reliability of service. Bingo. A winner. Not
perfect but then life so rarely is.

Owen