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A5/1 Security Project: Latest News

This project aims to publicize cryptographic weaknesses in cellular networks like GSM. It has computed large rainbow tables that allow decrypting GSM calls and messages. The project uses GPUs and distributed computing to generate and store the rainbow table codebook for decrypting intercepted GSM data in seconds. It provides tools and instructions for contributing computing resources to generate more tables.

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Jan Nilsson
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154 views2 pages

A5/1 Security Project: Latest News

This project aims to publicize cryptographic weaknesses in cellular networks like GSM. It has computed large rainbow tables that allow decrypting GSM calls and messages. The project uses GPUs and distributed computing to generate and store the rainbow table codebook for decrypting intercepted GSM data in seconds. It provides tools and instructions for contributing computing resources to generate more tables.

Uploaded by

Jan Nilsson
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A5/1 http://reflextor.

com/trac/a51

+++UPDATE+++UPDATE+++UPDATE

The website is being moved to its new home. Information is this website may be outdated. The
mailing list is still this one. Please use the redmine facilities to file bug reports.

+++END+++UPDATE

A5/1 Security Project


This project aims at publicizing cryptographic weaknesses found in today's cellular networks. We
are not advocating to exploit these weaknesses but rather want to inform about the fact that
GSM calls are already being intercepted and decrypted using commercial tools.

Latest News
We presented the current state of the project ( Slides) at the 26C3 conference in Berlin. The
main take-aways were:

The community has computed a large number of rainbow tables (Thank you!)
We found new sources of known plaintext which allows decryption with a smaller subset of
the codebook than previously thought
A full GSM interceptor to collect GSM data could hypothetically be built from open source
components. We have not done so as it may be illegal in some countries.

The latest updates are communicated through the mailing list.

Stay up to date with the NewsAndChanges, and find a common answers in the FAQ

Sorting and Sharing Rainbow Tables


If you already computed rainbow tables using the tools provided below, then it is time to make
your tables usable through sorting them. Please also share the tables through Bittorrent. The
sort process is explained in this quick tutorial (and requires this program). Currently there is no
working source code to compile to other architectures. We are working on this.

Technical Background
The attack on the A5/1 cipher this project implements, is a reimplementation of the THC work
THC, which was done in early 2008 but never released.

The Time/Memory Trade-off framework is still in its early stage of development. Comments and
bug reports through the mailing list are greatly appreciated.

Our approach differs slightly in that we use more common hardware to generate the tables,
namely, NVidia and ATI graphics cards with GPGPU capability, and attempt to build a distributed
infrastructure of nodes. In this distributed effort each node donates computing power for the
generation and disk spacefor the storage of a piece of the rainbow table code book. The
combined distributed code book can be used to decrypt GSM voice calls and text messages in
seconds.

For information on generating the data needed for decryption please visit http://airprobe.org.

Creating A5/1 Rainbow Tables


Announcement: In case you are using a software revision earlier than September, please
upgrade to increase the efficiency of the table generation

To start contributing computing time, please get unique table parameters here.

Get a working copy of the table generator by either:

A) Downloading binaries (linux 32bit) (linux 64bit) (windows 32bit) (windows 64bit). (revision
58 from October 25 2009) -or-

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A5/1 http://reflextor.com/trac/a51

B) CompilingTheProgram (Code available through: svn co https://svn.reflextor.com/tmto-svn )

Then, RunningTheProgram

Setting Options
Important note: The only way that the software should be used at this point is to run with a fixed
set of options without deviation. As it is still alpha software, other uses to certainly reveal bugs.
Some of the documented features are not actually implemented but will be in the near future.
The only reason for giving out incomplete software is the fact that table generation takes a lot of
time and should be started as soon as possible.

These are the options that should be used now to generate tables. Every table that is generated
needs to have a different initial seed for the round function generator, which is given as the
arguments to the advance sub option of the --roundfunc:generator option. As you can see the
seed is zero in the example. Use the cgi above to request a tabled. At this stage of deployment,
the developers will answer all your questions and check small portions of your generated tables
against a reference implementation (set the --chains option of the generate command to
something like 1024 and send in the generated table, for example by creating a trac ticket).

With the build-in default configuration file, the invocation looks like this:

$ a51table --advance XXX --consume file:prefix=data:append --network nickname=<your_

Written in full detail that amounts to:

--condition rounds:rounds=32
--roundfunc xor:condition=distinguished_point::bits=15:generator=lfsr::tablesize=32:
--network nickname=your_name:password=<your_passwd>:host=reflextor.com:port=80
--implementation sharedmem
--algorithm A51
--device cuda:operations=512
--work random:prefix=11,0
--consume file:prefix=data:append
--logger normal
generate
--chains 270000000
--chainlength 3000000
--intermediate filter:runlength=512

Architecture

A5/1

GSM

Performance

TableStructure

NetworkStructure

History

InThePress

FurtherReading

RandomIdeas

YouCanHelpUs

PublicSpace? - create your own pages here

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