> Real-Time Cryptanalysis of GSM's A5/1 on a PC
>
> Alex Biryukov and Adi Shamir
At last! Congratulations are in order. Way to go, Alex and Adi!
Between the COMP128 and A5/2 work of our group and Alex and Adi's break of
A5/1, my motivation for finishing that software radio-based GSM interception
station has just increased greatly. Not that I wasn't motivated to begin
with. :-)
Even counting the almost 200 GB of drive space that seem to be required by
this new attack, we still should come in well under the USD 10,000 target
figure. We tested the code the came out of my reverse engineering against
official test vectors, so I am confident that Alex and Adi's caveat that the
attack will only work if the A5/1 code is correct won't be an issue.
It will be interesting to see the actual attack. Our 15 milliseconds attack
against A5/2 only works because several properties of the cipher come
together just right. I wonder if the same holds true for the new attack
against A5/1...
We live in interesting times,
--Lucky
