|
Your mobile phone might not be as
secure as you think!
Imagine your company is holding secret talks to buy another
firm when your main competitor suddenly snaps it up from under your nose,
apparently aware of all the details of the negotiations. And while you instigate a widespread investigation, the culprit could be nothing
more sinister than a cell phone "accidentally" left in the corner of the room,
placed in a plant pot or taped under the boardroom table.
With a slight modification, cell phones become high-quality bugs. An owner can
call the phone from anywhere in the world without it emitting a ringing tone
while its screen remains blank, apparently turned off.
Or how about the GunPhone,
unfortunately the weapon of choice for Al Queda.
A number of government agencies and even third parties able to infiltrate
mobile network buildings and set up recording of your mobile phones calls.
However, the GSM Association in October 2002 showed off a new security
algorithm, known as A5/3, that will provide users of GSM mobile phones with
an even higher level of protection against eavesdropping than they have
already. It will ensure that even if a prospective attacker manages to pull
a GSM phone call out of the radio waves, he will be completely unable to
make sense of it, even if he throws massive computing resources at the task.
There are a number of
additional solutions to these problems.
Cell
Phone Detectors that listen out for certain phone frequencies and
alert you that a mobile phone is transmitting and receiving. People trust cell phones, but modified and left in idle mode the cell phone can
be used as a transmitter for up to a week. If it's connected to a power supply
it can provide endless intelligence. Professional bugsweepers will ignore the
cell phone frequency since the phones are so common and not suspicious.
Cell
Phone Jammers that will send out a blocking signal to stop any
cellphone within a certain range and at a certain frequency from transmitting
and receiving.
Mobile Phone
Blocker
Cell Phone Call Scramblers that, attached
to or built into some cellphones, will scramble the voice portion of the call
usually by sending the call over a data channel instead of over the unsecured
voice channel. Usually, when a soft "Crypto"
key is pressed, the two phones and the receiving phone automatically select
a new 128 bit encryption. In some, over 1038 possible codes are possible
and with
termination of the call, the code is deleted immediately. The code
change is apart from the key length an important safety factor. Some,
like the General Dynamics Sectera Module, implement the National
Institute of Standards (NIST) Advanced Encryption System (AES) standard (Rijndael)
for its high assurance protection. The Sectéra security module uses the
same security core architecture that was developed for use in several devices
designed to protect U.S. Government classified communications.
|
|
|
.gif){kind=spacer}