RE: RSA's RC5-64 Secret Key Challenge has been solved.

2002-09-27 Thread Lucky Green

John wrote:
 After getting that getting started, though, I suggest 
 beginning a brute-force attack on the GSM cellphone 
 encryption algorithm.  That's in use in hundreds of millions 
 of devices worldwide, protecting (or failing to protect) the 
 privacy of billions of phone calls a day.

According to the GSM Association's website there are currently 732
million GSM users world-wide. Still, I suspect that unlike RC5 and DES,
GSM's two voice privacy algorithms A5/1 and A5/2 might not be the best
candidates for brute force distributed key searches since the algorithms
were badly designed, are fundamentally broken, and thus are subject to
very efficient cryptanalytical attacks with work factors well below the
64-bit key space nominally utilized by GSM.

A5/2, the weaker of the two algorithms, can be broken in real-time on a
single, low-end, Pentium class computer.

A5/1, the stronger of the two algorithms, falls to a near real-time
attack on computing hardware far from bleeding edge, but the attack as
published requires a 2^48 preprocessing stage. That table could be
generated by a distributed effort.

http://cryptome.org/a51-bsw.htm

Unfortunately, the greatest challenge in publicly demonstrating the
insecurity of GSM and other civilian wireless communication protocols
lies not in breaking the compromised crypto, but in obtaining the
required RF and signal processing equipment. Full-featured equipment is
priced with governmental customers in mind and difficult to obtain.
Commercial-grade interception hardware usually lacks cryptanalytical
features.

Software defined radios would be well-suited to task, but those who
expended the effort of writing software-defined cellular telephony
modules so far understandably chose to sell the fruits of their labor to
paying customers rather than releasing the code as Open Source.

Until the required equipment becomes readily available to the public,
the interested parties likely will continue to make the same outrageous
claims they made in the past, such as that GSM is secure against
eavesdroppers irrespective of how weak the ciphers have been shown to be
since the GSM signal itself cannot be intercepted...

Lastly, while a publicly available A5/1 precomputation table would
likely be of interest to researchers, myself included, anybody
considering creating that table may wish to inquire with competent legal
counsel as to the legality of performing this research in the U.S.

--Lucky Green


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: RSA's RC5-64 Secret Key Challenge has been solved.

2002-09-27 Thread Ralf-P. Weinmann

On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 02:45:12PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
 [...]
 
 After getting that getting started, though, I suggest beginning a
 brute-force attack on the GSM cellphone encryption algorithm.  That's
 in use in hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, protecting (or
 failing to protect) the privacy of billions of phone calls a day.

Is A5/3 deployed yet? If not, a brute force attack is not needed, for A5/1 and
A5/2 more efficient tools exist to cryptanalyse it. Even in real-time, although
you might need to invest in some hard disk space before being able to eavesdrop
and intercept. See the following paper for more information:

A. Biryukov, A. Shamir and D. Wagner, Real Time Cryptanalysis of A5/1 on a PC

As for A5/3, I'm not really sure what key length network operators are/will be
using, 64-128 bits are allowed in the design requirements documentation. The
specification should be available on the 3GPP website. A5/3 is based on Kasumi.

Cheers,
Ralf

-- 
Ralf-P. Weinmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]



RE: RSA's RC5-64 Secret Key Challenge has been solved.

2002-09-27 Thread Trei, Peter

 Ralf-P. Weinmann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
 
 
 On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 02:45:12PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
  [...]
  
  After getting that getting started, though, I suggest beginning a
  brute-force attack on the GSM cellphone encryption algorithm.  That's
  in use in hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, protecting (or
  failing to protect) the privacy of billions of phone calls a day.
 
 Is A5/3 deployed yet? If not, a brute force attack is not needed, for A5/1
 and
 A5/2 more efficient tools exist to cryptanalyse it. Even in real-time,
 although
 you might need to invest in some hard disk space before being able to
 eavesdrop
 and intercept. See the following paper for more information:
 
 A. Biryukov, A. Shamir and D. Wagner, Real Time Cryptanalysis of A5/1 on
 a PC
 
 As for A5/3, I'm not really sure what key length network operators
 are/will be
 using, 64-128 bits are allowed in the design requirements documentation.
 The
 specification should be available on the 3GPP website. A5/3 is based on
 Kasumi.
 
 Cheers,
 Ralf
 
I spoke to David McNett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) yesterday. He told me that
they intend to fire up a the RC5-72 challenge, hoping to get lucky and find
the key near the beginning.

I think they're open to other suggestions, however. Factoring may or may not
be reasonable. While RC5, DES, etc require minimal memory and storage,
and can so run unobtrusively in the spare cycles of almost any machine,
factoring,
- even the seiving step - has large memory and storage requirements. The
matrix reduction step at the end does not have any efficient distributed
implementation
I'm aware of.

I think the lower RSA factoring challenges *may* be possible - RSA-576 is
still
standing, with a $10k prize. Other factoring challenges have up to $200k
prizes.

Challenges need to be carefully set up. It must be legal - hacking a
deployed
system in the face of the objections of the owner won't fly. It must be
credible,
in that there must be no reason to suspect collaboration between the 
challenger and the attacker. It must be realistic - it should model a
real-world
use closely enough to show that changes need to be made (the RSA secret
key challenges where designed with IPSEC headers in mind - the single DES
option was deprecated as soon as we showed that to be weak).

This is an exciting time. With RC5-64 fallen, there are a lot of options for
what
to do next. The most interesting thing may not involve cryptanalysis.

Peter Trei



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]



RE: RSA's RC5-64 Secret Key Challenge has been solved.

2002-09-27 Thread Peter Clay

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Lucky Green wrote:

 Software defined radios would be well-suited to task, but those who
 expended the effort of writing software-defined cellular telephony
 modules so far understandably chose to sell the fruits of their labor to
 paying customers rather than releasing the code as Open Source.

The GNU project has a SDR implementation, which claims to implement at
least a plain FM receiver, and has GSM as a future direction:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/gnuradio.html

Of course, as soon as someone implements a satellite PPV decoder on top of
it the entire technology will probably be banned :(

Pete
-- 
Peter Clay | Campaign for   _  _| .__
   | Digital   /  / | |
   | Rights!   \_ \_| |
   | http://uk.eurorights.org


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: RSA's RC5-64 Secret Key Challenge has been solved.

2002-09-27 Thread Greg Rose

At 01:16 PM 9/27/2002 +0200, Ralf-P. Weinmann wrote:
Is A5/3 deployed yet?

Kasumi (in the form of f8 (ciphering) and f9 (integrity) is beginning 
to be deployed in UMTS (WidebandCDMA) mobiles as we speak. But an exact 
specification of how to use Kasumi as A5/3 has only just been agreed; it 
will be 6-12 months (at least) before any significant amount of equipment, 
either fixed or mobile, will be produced and deployed, and it will be a 
couple more years after that before there will be significant probability 
that a call is encrypted using A5/3.

As for A5/3, I'm not really sure what key length network operators are/will be
using, 64-128 bits are allowed in the design requirements documentation. The
specification should be available on the 3GPP website. A5/3 is based on 
Kasumi.

A5/3 will be stuck at 64 bit keys for the forseeable future, due to 
compatibility issues in the protocol. f8 and f9, on the other hand, already 
use 128-bit keys.

regards,
Greg.

Greg Rose   INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Qualcomm Australia  VOICE:  +61-2-9817 4188   FAX: +61-2-9817 5199
Level 3, 230 Victoria Road,http://people.qualcomm.com/ggr/
Gladesville NSW 2111232B EC8F 44C6 C853 D68F  E107 E6BF CD2F 1081 A37C


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]