Route 66: Passively breaking all GSM channels

Abstract

The A5/2 stream cipher used for encryption in the GSM mobile phone standard has previously been shown to have serious weaknesses. Due to a lack of key separation and flaws in the security protocols, these vulnerabilities can also compromise the stronger GSM ciphers A5/1 and A5/3. Despite GSM's huge impact in the field, only a small selection of its channels have been analyzed. In this paper, we perform a complete practical-complexity, ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of all 66 encoded GSM channels. Moreover, we present a new passive attack which recovers the encryption key by exploiting the location updating procedure of the GSM protocol. This update is performed automatically even when the phone is not actively used. Interestingly, the attack potentially enables eavesdropping of future calls. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.