How easy is it to penetrate a wireless network?

NEW DELHI, INDIA: If thought your conversations over mobile phones are secure, you may better get rid of that notion. According to an expert, it is possible to intercept wireless network of GSM operators in less than a second and listen to all calls being transmitted from base transceiver station (BTS) as GSM networks are virtually not secure.

“There are zero per cent secure GSM network and 40 per cent secure mobile phones,” said German scientist Karsten Nohl, who is a security researcher at Virginia University, in a telephonic conversation with CIOL.

“GSM network security had been relying on 20-year-old encryption code, A5/1. Computing power available today is capable of breaking encryption code A5/1. Even computing power of play station can break this encryption code,” he added.

Recently, at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, which is also the largest hacker conference in Europe, Nohl had demonstrated the vulnerability of GSM network, by cracking the encryption of the GSM mobile code that used to protect the GSM mobile conversations from being heard.

During the interaction, Nohl elaborated that a person will need to spend only $30,000 on a few computing devices to decrypt A5/1 encryption code in a second. This is also possible to do using a single CPU but by enhancing its computing power using a bunch of FPGA chips.

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