A5/1 cracked

Margaret mairead at mindspring.com
Tue May 11 07:36:29 PDT 1999


Doug wrote:


>Ooops, I misspelled his name. McNealy's exact words were: "Get over it. You
>have no privacy."

Oy. I get his name right about 1 time in 3. I thought I was being clever this time by remembering that it's not spelt 'McNiely'. Oh well, perhaps I'll do better next time.

I did know the words, I just didn't/don't know the context or his motives.


>I just don't believe that. Maybe I'm overestimating their powers, but I
>always assume the National Security Agency can tap anything it wants to.

Well, that's rather where the turn-pumpkin or game/candle comes into it. NSA can certainly crack a lot, but often not before the information has passed its sell-by date. And since even they have finite computational resources, most messages aren't worth their while to attack.

Plus, there really are codes that simply *cannot* be broken, regardless of the resources thrown at them, because they offer no 'point of attack'. One-time pads, for example. And superencryption. Nearly all modern cypher devices are virtual one-time pads: they never re-use a key, so for messages of reasonable length and unknown content there's simply no point of attack. Cracking any code depends on being able to know when to proceed and when to stop. Superencryption denies both those pieces of information: when you find a second layer of gibberish under the first, is it real gibberish or artificial? I.e., did you not get the first key right, or is it superencrypted? There's usually no way to tell. And it's simply computationally infeasible to try brute force.

Voice can be treated the same way as any other information: once digitised, it's just bits. Interception can be defeated with spread-spectrum frequency hopping under program control, and the digitised voice stream can be superencrypted in realtime, using special hardware.

Comm can indeed be made secure, even from NSA...and they hate it!

Margaret



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