California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones

Re:California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones by detaro on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @11:31PM (#10986289)

For GSM encryption, at least the commonly deployed variants, you do not need cooperation or stolen keys, you can just straight-up break it in a few minutes. (EDIT: might not be correct for up-to-date networks, see below)

And if you impersonate a cell tower instead of passively sniffing, you can just turn encryption off or downgrade to a weak one.

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Re:California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones by yuhong on Thursday January 28, 2016 @12:15AM (#10986436)

I think the strongest one deployed today (A5/3 and GEA3) can be brute forced (64-bit), but typically takes far more than a few minutes.

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Re:California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones by detaro on Thursday January 28, 2016 @12:45AM (#10986534)

You seem to be right. There is a paper about fast attacks against A5/3, but according to the authors it doesn't necessarily apply to real attack scenarios.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/013

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Re:California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones by yuhong on Thursday January 28, 2016 @03:34AM (#10987100)

Yea, related key attack I think.

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