Engineering Commons^™

Sniffing, Decoding And Decryption Of Gsm Signals Using Low Cost Hardware And Open-Source Software, Muhammad Talha Choudhry

Dissertations and Theses

We have participated in the creation of almost two terabytes of tables aimed at cracking A5/1, the most common ciphering algorithm used in GSM. Given 114-bit of known plaintext, we are able to recover the session key with a hit rate of 19%. The tables are expected to be unique as they provide the best coverage yet known to the authors and research workers and they are the first step in a real-world passive attack against GSM. An initial investigation and analysis into the air interface of GSM were performed, from both a theoretical and practical point of view. These …