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Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios (www.schneier.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world.

Most interestingly is the researchers’ findings of what they describe as the backdoor in TEA1. Ordinarily, radios using TEA1 used a key of 80-bits. But Wetzels said the team found a “secret reduction step” which dramatically lowers the amount of entropy the initial key offered. An attacker who followed this step would then be able to decrypt intercepted traffic with consumer-level hardware and a cheap software defined radio dongle.

Schneier with the obvious take:

Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm going to guess that Consumer level means you still need a beast with 4 big GPUs or Threadripper style CPU. That said, this is easily within the reach of Organised Crime

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You don't need any of that. Just spin up a few AWS GPU instances for a few minutes and you're done. Anyone remember CloudCracker?