Guys, what is wrong with you (sorry)?
I've been doing software development related to GSM for quite some time now, have contributed to airprobe and am now mostly working on OpenBSC and OsmocomBB. The problem with regard to practical GSM A5 cracking is not that hardware is too expensive or that you need to do your own custom hardware. The problem is that everybody wants a solution / software / ... but very few people actually are willing to put in the required time, sit down, get their hands dirty and make it work. The state of airprobe's various receivers (tvoid, gsmsp, gsm-receiver) has only improved marginally throughout the last years. Even today, they are nothing more than a proof of concept. They're far from what somebody would want to do actual real-world intercept. They don't even support the various GSM channel types, they don't contain the neccessarry frequency / gain control loops for long-time reception, ... This has all been clear for years. Work in this area is completely unrelated to the actual A5/1 cracking and the rainbow tables. There was no dependency on the rainbow tables needing to be completed before work on the airprobe receiver code could have been done. During the same timeframe, a really great Free Software GSM receiver implementation has been released publicly: That of OpenBTS. Yet, nobody has lifted a finger and transformed that implementation (and its contained laurent approximation based demodulation code) into a new airprobe receiver. Piotr is one of the few guys who actually contributed, and I'd like to express my gratitude for his work. But whether you use a USRP2, a USD 20,000 military SDR or a small custom cheap board will not change the fact that somebody still needs to write good demodulaton/decoding software. And any work spent on new hardware development is not going to bring any progress to the project. Please focus your scarce resources where it is really needed... -- - Harald Welte <[email protected]> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6) _______________________________________________ A51 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51
