Abstract

Abstract. A5/1 is the strong version of the encryption algorithm used by about 130 million GSM customers in Europe to protect the over-the-air privacy of their cellular voice and data communication. The best published attacks against it require between 2 40 and 2 45 steps. This level of security makes it vulnerable to hardware-based attacks by large organizations, but not to software-based attacks on multiple targets by hackers. In this paper we describe new attacks on A5/1, which are based on subtle flaws in the tap structure of the registers, their noninvertible clocking mechanism, and their frequent resets. After a 2 48 parallelizable data preparation stage (which has to be carried out only once), the actual attacks can be carried out in real time on a single PC. The first attack requires the output of the A5/1 algorithm during the first two minutes of the conversation, and computes the key in about one second. The second attack requires the output of the A5/1 algorithm during about two seconds of the conversation, and computes the key in several minutes. The two attacks are related, but use diffrent types of time-memory tradeoff. The attacks were verified with actual implementations, except for the preprocessing stage which was extensively sampled rather than completely executed. REMARK: We based our attack on the version of the algorithm which was derived by reverse engineering an actual GSM telephone and published at

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