The Draft EU Drugs Action Plan 2021-25 is heading to the Council for approval, and amongst other things includes an action to "improve possibilities to tackle encryption," as well as the use of new technologies (including the near-ubiquitous "artificial intelligence") for "monitoring suspicious postal items... while preserving the fundamental right of privacy of correspondence." https://www.statewatch.org/news/2021/june/eu-drugs-strategy-includes-actions-to-tackle-encryption-and-postal-snooping/

#Encryption #EU #AI

Backdoor found in 2G mobile data encryption standard

Cryptanalysis of GPRS Encryption Algorithms GEA-1 suggest intentional weakness

GPRS is the mobile data standard for GSM mobile phones. It's from the 2G era, and is old and slow. GEA-1 is an encryption algorithm used with GPRS.

Excerpt from the abstract:
"This paper presents the first publicly available cryptanalytic attacks on the GEA-1 and GEA-2 algorithms."

[..]

"This unusual pattern indicates that the weakness is intentionally hidden to limit the security level to 40 bit by design."

So in other words: GPRS was intentionally backdoored.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/819

Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686422

https://apnews.com/article/europe-technology-business-3bddc473856a9af259feb511f58a51d3

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-77886-6_6

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/handy-gprs-verschluesselung-1.5323228

#backdoor #2g #gprs #encryption