----- Forwarded message from Eric Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 01:05:24 +1000 From: Eric Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Orig-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: EKR <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Eric Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Scott Guthery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rich Salz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Bill Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, cypherpunks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Ian Grigg wrote: >It's like the GSM story, whereby 8 years >down the track, Lucky Green cracked the >crypto by probing the SIMs to extract >the secret algorithm over a period of >many months (which algorithm then fell to >Ian Goldberg and Dave Wagner in a few hours). > >In that case, some GSM guy said that, it >was good because it worked for 8 years, >that shows the design was good, doesn't >it? > >And Lucky said, now you've got to replace >hundreds of millions of SIMs, that's got >to be a bad design, no? > > Well the point here is that the data encryption in GSM is not relevant to the people running the network. The authentication is secure, so there is no fraud, so they still get the money from network usage. Privacy was never really there since the traffic is not encrypted once it hit the base station, so the relevant government agencies can be kept happy. The encryption was only relevant to protect the consumers from each other. eric (hopefully remembering things correctly) ----- End forwarded message -----
