Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked 54
New submitter The Mister Purple writes "A team of German researchers appears to have cracked the GMR-1 and GMR-2 encryption algorithms used by many (though not all) satellite phones. Anyone fancy putting a cluster together for a listening party? 'Mr. Driessen told The Telegraph that the equipment and software needed to intercept and decrypt satellite phone calls from hundreds of thousands of users would cost as little as $2,000. His demonstration system takes up to half an hour to decipher a call, but a more powerful computer would allow eavesdropping in real time, he said.'"
Re:Security through obscurity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Security through obscurity (Score:5, Interesting)
(...taking into account what has happened with other algorithms (DES, anyone?))
Not sure you really have a good example there. Apparently, the NSA helped IBM select the S-box for DES and didn't give any explaination for this. Contemporary cryptographers (e.g, Diffie and Hellman) were up-in-arms that the NSA was trying to put a backdoor into DES and questioned the secrecy of the development of the process. Little did they know that the NSA was just collaborating with IBM to avoid a potential weakness in the random S-boxes to be more robust against differential analysis attacks.
Certainly as a general rule security through obscurity is not a great general strategy, however, DES probably isn't a good example to illustrate this since at the time, the NSA knew much more about breaking encryption than contemporary public cryptographers.
To me, it's like you're a CPA/EA and letting your know-it-all teenager check over your tax return. Maybe they'd find some mistake or deduction that you didn't find, or maybe they will figure out how much money you make and want a raise in their allowance. It's a tradeoff for sure. But it isn't like taking your return to H&R Block and asking them to check it over. Maybe it's more like the H&R Block situation now, but with DES back in the 70's, it was sorta more like the teenager situation.