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Um guys, A5/3 is completely broken. According to Wikipedia: "In 2010, Dunkelman, Keller and Shamir published a new attack that allows an adversary to recover a full A5/3 key by related-key attack.[5] The time and space complexities of the attack are low enough that the authors carried out the attack in two hours on an Intel Core 2 Duo desktop computer even using the unoptimized reference KASUMI implementation. The authors note that this attack may not be applicable to the way A5/3 is used in 3G systems; their main purpose was to discredit 3GPP's assurances that their changes to MISTY wouldn't significantly impact the security of the algorithm."

Even if A5/3 weren't broken, there are still tower dumps and IMSI catchers, which are a whole lot easier to use than breaking encryption. Yes A5/3 is better than A5/1, but I call bullshit on this whole article.




>Yes A5/3 is better than A5/1, but I call bullshit on this whole article.

Super pendantic, but the title is 'hardens' not 'makes hard'. If it's better, than it's been hardened. Might not be the best thing available, but that's the meaning of a comparative.


Super-duper pedantic, but I would say broken can be considered neither hard nor hardened.


> The authors note that this attack may not be applicable to the way A5/3 is used in 3G systems.

This is a pretty big conditional. But I still imagine intel agencies have broken KASUMI.


Yea, it is a related-key attack.


Indeed, I would not personally consider using KASUMI to be a positive change worthy of the title of "hardening".




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