Feds' Radios Have Significant Security Flaws

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal has a story describing how the portable radios used by many federal law enforcement agents have major security flaws that allow for easy eavesdropping and jamming. Details are in a new study being released today (PDF). The authors of the study were able to intercept hundreds of hours of sensitive traffic inadvertently sent without encryption over the past two years. They also describe how a texting toy targeted at teenage girls can be modified to jam transmissions from the affected radios, either encrypted or not."

Re:The Federal Government Has Major IT Problems

[AvitarX]

There is, you're allowed to Sue on behalf of the government if it doesn't do so itself. You get a 30 percent take.

Re:Not everything is encrypted

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obviously, any RF device can be jammed(if nothing else, a correctly crafted jamming signal could cause destructive interference resulting in zero signal at the receiver site; but good luck with that one...); but the difficulty of doing so can vary widely. If a spark-gap that blacks out the east coast and draws complaints from the FCC-analogs of 6 nearby countries jams something, the designer gets a pass. If some FCC approved kiddie toy can jam it, the system is likely being attacked in a manner significantly more sophisticated than brute force...

From TFA: " But, as we will see below, the situation is actually far more favorable to the jammer than analysis of its modulation scheme alone might suggest. In fact, the aggregate power level required to jam P25 trafc is actually much lower than that required to jam analog FM. This is because an adversary can disrupt P25 trafc very efciently by targeting only specific small portions of frames to jam and turning off its transmitter at other times... It is therefore unnecessary for an adversary to jam the entire transmitted data stream in order to prevent a receiver from receiving it. It is sufcient for an attacker to prevent the reception merely of those portions of a frame that are needed for the receiver to make sense of the rest of the frame. Unfortunately, the P25 frame encoding makes it particularly easy and efcient for a jammer to attack these subelds in isolation."

Oops: A sophisticated digital RF transmission mechanism substantially more vulnerable to jamming than analog narrowband...

Re:Nothing to see here

[mmontour]

Uh. Yeah. I think FCC rules prohibit encryption

There's no overall ban on encryption, although some services such as amateur (Ham) radio aren't allowed to use it.

You are thinking HAM frequencies

[Sycraft-fu]

You can't do encryption over HAM waves because it is supposed to be free and open to all that qualify, not a place for exclusivity. Also they want to be able to monitor to make sure people aren't using it for commercial purposes.

However on other bands, encryption is just fine. You really think the military uses unencrypted radio for all their communications?

For that matter, your cell phone is encrypted. Grated it isn't very good encryption, but it is encrypted. All digital cell phones are.

It's not the 90's anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

The changeover started pre 9/11, but the influx of Federal funds after that really kicked it into high gear. All or nearly all major metro areas now use digital, encryptable radio systems and they're spreading to smaller and smaller counties and cities. And thanks to the Publc Safety push they're using the P25 standard for interoperability.

It has made it much harder for journalists to learn about news-worthy incidents.