TL;DR: The only newsworthy vulnerability is the breaking TEA1 - which is anyways the least secure of them all and only intended for commercial use (that is, no emergency services). https://www.tetraburst.com/
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Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
11–20 of 91 posts
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#12Sounds like they took the "roll your own and don't tell anyone how it works" approach. Security by obscurity is never security. History has shown that the open encryption standards are the most secure.
Obscurity should never replace security, but it can and does augment security by increasing the cost to even study the security.
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#13TL;DR: The only newsworthy vulnerability is the breaking TEA1 - which is anyways the least secure of them all and only intended for commercial use (that is, no emergency services). https://www.tetraburst.com/
> TL;DR: The only newsworthy vulnerability is the breaking TEA1
This is IMHO a very unfair TLDR; . The news is that the researchers claim that there is deliberate backdoor, which ETSI denies. If it is true, there cannot be any further trust in other proprietary parts as well.
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#14What exactly were TETRA radios used for? I assume they were government/infra related, but then I don't understand why they'd need to backdoor the keying
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#15What exactly were TETRA radios used for? I assume they were government/infra related, but then I don't understand why they'd need to backdoor the keying
They don't so much backdoor the keying as that they have 4 different cipher profiles, and the one approved for global rather than European use (TEA1) compresses the key from 80 to 32 bits.
It's essentially a surreptitious version of what the US did in the 1990s with "export ciphers".
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#16> The vulnerabilities were discovered during the course of 2020, and were reported to the NCSC in the Netherlands in December of that year. It was decided to hold off public disclosure until July 2023, to give emergency services and equipment suppliers the ability to patch the equipment. Interesting discussion about responsible disclosure. It seems a strange belief that you can tell all the radio operators about the…
Immediate public disclosure.
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#17Sounds like they took the "roll your own and don't tell anyone how it works" approach. Security by obscurity is never security. History has shown that the open encryption standards are the most secure.
You can't easily put backdoors in cryptographic algorithms that can be audited
You certainly can.
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#18The newsworthy item here is that this is an intentional backdoor. The wikipedia pages list the specific uses per country and department. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio#Usag...
Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#19Re: Vulnerabilities in TETRA radio networks
#20Sounds like they took the "roll your own and don't tell anyone how it works" approach. Security by obscurity is never security. History has shown that the open encryption standards are the most secure.
It's more of intentionally reducing the keyspace when generating keys. You can use weakly generated keys with industry-standard encryption algorithms. When your 4096-bit key is only 32 bits, it doesn't matter how well-trusted the algorithm is.