One for the paranoid this Friday, as the O'Reilly Radar reports that the A5 Hardware Project will be releasing a web service to crack the GSM A5/1 Encryption Protocol. Pick up a radio receiver (around $700) and the potential is there to crack and listen to a call while it is in progress.
Read on in the full article.
....looks like certain people are also interested 😉....... http://blog.thc.org/index.php?/archives/1-GSM-Researcher-stopped-at-Heathrow-Airport-by-UK-government-officials.html
More incentive for more throughout 3g coverage then! :P
AFAIK the (local) Government needs not bother with computational cost of GSM A5/1 cracking (or anything like that) - they just access the MSC (Mobile Switching Center) and cleartext traffic streams there.
Would this apply to 3g calls? (is it utmts?)
voip would make it even harder to decrypt, i guess.
This seems like old news. GSM A5/1 wasn't a secure standard since the beginning.