Cybersecurity researchers in Europe say they have discovered a flaw in an encryption algorithm used by cellphones that may have allowed attackers to eavesdrop on some data traffic for more than two decades.<\/p>\n
In a paper published Wednesday, researchers from Germany, France and Norway said the flaw affects the GPRS – or 2G – mobile data standard.<\/p>\n
While most phones now use 4G or even 5G standards, GPRS remains a fallback for data connections in some countries.<\/p>\n
The vulnerability in the GEA-1 algorithm is unlikely to have been an accident, the researchers said. Instead, it was probably created intentionally to provide law enforcement agencies with a “backdoor” and comply with laws restricting the export of strong encryption tools.<\/p>\n
“According to our experimental analysis, having six correct numbers in the German lottery twice in a row is about as likely as having these properties of the key occur by chance,” Christof Beierle of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, a co-author of the paper, said.<\/p>\n
The GEA-1 algorithm was meant to be phased out from cellphones as early as 2013, but the researchers said they found it in current Android and iOS smartphones.<\/p>\n
Cellphone manufacturers and standards organizations have been notified to fix the flaw, they said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cybersecurity researchers in Europe say they have discovered a flaw in an encryption algorithm used by cellphones that may have allowed attackers to eavesdrop on some data traffic for more than two decades. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers from Germany, France and Norway said the flaw affects the GPRS – or 2G – mobile data standard. While most phones now use 4G or even 5G standards, GPRS remains a fallback for data connections in some countries. The vulnerability in the GEA-1 algorithm is unlikely to have been an accident, the researchers said. Instead, it was probably created intentionally to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}