A5/1 cracked

[Margaret]

>[From Nettime. Can someone explain what this is all about? - Doug]
>
>"A Pedagogical Implementation of A5/1," by Marc Briceno,
>Ian Goldberg, and David Wagner.
>
>   http://jya.com/a51-pi.htm
>
>"With COMP128 broken and A5/1 published below, we will
>now turn our attention to A5/2. The latter has been acknowledged
>by the GSM community to have been specifically designed by
>intelligence agencies for lack of security."

COMP128 is (was!) the proposed method for
authenticating the source of a phonecall.

A5/2 was a 'strong' encryption algorithm for 'high'
security.

The comp128 architecture document was leaked to the
world, and the A5/2 algorithm has been broken.  

Net result:  if you get a phonecall, there's (now) no
way to verify that it's from the phone it claims to be,
and there's no way to keep the conversation from being
snooped.