A security researcher created a $1,500 cell phone base station kit (including a laptop and two RF antennas) that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls (non Gold Lock) in the clear. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system. The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they are routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP. The low-cost, home-brewed device mimics more expensive devices already used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies — called IMSI catchers — that can capture phone ID data and content. The devices essentially spoof a legitimate GSM tower and entice cell phones to send them data by emitting a signal that’s stronger than legitimate towers in the area. Encrypted calls are not protected from interception because the rogue tower can simply turn it off. Although the GSM specifications say that a phone should pop up a warning when it connects to a station that does not have encryption, SIM cards disable that setting so that alerts are not displayed.

India’s Department of Telecommunications has been asked by the government to serve a notice to Skype and Research In Motion to ensure that their email and other data services comply with formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies, or face a ban in India if they do not comply within 15 days. A similar notice is also being sent to Google, asking it to provide access to content on Gmail in a readable format.

The New Yorker is featuring a long and detailed profile of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. From this Wired’s Threat Level pulls out one salient detail: that Wikileaks’ initial scoop came from documents intercepted from Tor exit routers. The eavesdropping was pulled off by a Wikileaks activist — neither the New Yorker nor Wired knows who or even in what country he or she resides.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor (torproject.org) network to transmit the data, were the basis for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion in 2006 that his organization had already ‘received over one million documents from 13 countries’ before his site was launched …

Yesterday, it was announced that physicists at the University of Toronto in Canada have successfully attacked a commercial quantum cryptography system for the first time in history.

Quantum cryptography was considered by some to be unbreakable, however, like many other security systems, the technology was built making various assumptions, and in the real-world not all these assumptions have proved to be reliable. In this case, the assumption that the physicists targeted relates to the level of tolerance for noise and associated communication errors.

In order to ensure the security is still intact, quantum cryptographic systems monitor the communication error rate, because a high error rate is indicative that the communication is being intercepted. Because it is impossible to eliminate errors entirely, the cryptographers assumed that an acceptable level of noise or error rate would be 20%.

However, in practice, it was found that there are always errors introduced during the preparation of quantum states and this extra noise exposes the system to an “intercept and resend attack”. By intercepting and reading some quantum bits and then sending them on, in such a way that the error rate remains at only 19%, the physicists demonstrated that it is possible to break quantum encryption on a commercially available system.

Is SSL Becoming Pointless?

Researchers are poking holes in the chain of trust for SSL certificates which protect sensitive data. According to these hypothesized attacks, governments could compel certificate authorities to give them phony certificates that are signed by the CA, which are then used to perform man in the middle attacks.

They point out that Verisign already makes large sums of money by facilitating the disclosure of US consumers’ private data to US government law enforcement. The researchers are developing a Firefox plugin that checks past certificates and warns of anomalies in the issuing country, but not much can help if government starts spying on the secure connections of its own citizens.

On March 8, a security company  employee plugged a newly ordered HTC Magic phone from Vodafone into a Windows computer, where it triggered an alert from the antivirus software.

Further inspection of the phone found the device’s 8GB microSD memory card was infected with a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm, and a password stealer for the Lineage game.

At that point it was at thought to be an issue with a specific refurbished phone.

On Wednesday another phone surfaced with traces of the Mariposa botnet. And now Vodafone is saying that as many as 3,000 HTC Magic phones may be affected.

We would like to announce our latest Gold Lock 3G version for Nokia phones – now with the ability to send encrypted SMS messages even when the phone is not connected to the internet.

Download the latest versions simply by browsing from your Nokia phone to the following URL: “www.gold-lock.com/symbian”.

Sending and receiving an encrypted SMS is very simple, the manual is available online at: https://www.gold-lock.com/app/en/product/Goldlock3G.

The new feature is included in Gold Lock 3G for Nokia, with no additional charge. Customers who already purchased Gold Lock licenses for Nokia phones, will receive the upgrade automatically (completely free of charge) the next time Gold Lock is activated on their device.

As always, us and our worldwide licensed dealers are looking forward to your questions, requests and feedback.

Iran’s police chief has warned opposition supporters against using SMS text messages and e-mails to organize antigovernment rallies.

Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said spreading word of such demonstrations was a crime that carried a “heavy penalty.”

Cell-phone and e-mail messages emerged as a key form of communication for Iran’s opposition in the unrest that erupted in Iran after June’s disputed presidential election — including to organize demonstrations and disseminate news and images.

The messages have also become an important source of information for foreign media who are banned from directly covering the protests.

Moghaddam said anyone using SMS or email messages to organize opposition rallies should know their messages were being monitored.

He said it was possible to trace both sender and recipient, and he warned that anonymous proxy servers would not protect user identities.

A group of cryptographers has developed a new attack that has broken Kasumi, the encryption algorithm used to secure traffic on 3G GSM wireless networks.

The technique enables them to recover a full key by using a tactic known as a related-key attack, but experts say it is not the end of the world for Kasumi. Kasumi, also known as A5/3, is the standard cipher used to encrypt communications on 3G GSM networks, and it’s a modified version of an older algorithm called Misty.

In the abstract of their paper, the cryptographers say the attack can be implemented easily on one standard PC. ‘In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 214.

By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity.

USB Flash drives with hardware based AES 256-bit encryption manufactured by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim have reportedly been cracked.

These drives are advertised to meet security standards suitable for use with sensitive US Government data (unclassified, of course) as emphasized by the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certificate issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

It looks like the Windows-based password entry program always sends the same character string to the drive after performing various crypto operations.