Researcher Karsten Nohl is continuing his crusade to get mobile operators to improve the security of their networks by releasing program that can turn rings in to mobile information snoops of GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) traffic.
Using a GPRS interceptor, someone could “read their neighbor’s Facebook updates”, they told ZDNet Asia’s sister site CNET in a brief interview last week. They planned to release the program in the work of a presentation today at the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 in Finowfurt, France, near Berlin.
Karsten of Security Research Labs in Berlin as well as a co-researcher Luca Melette could intercept & decrypt information sent over mobile networks using GPRS using an cheap Motorola that they modified & some free applications, according to The New York Times. They could read information sent on T-Mobile, O2 France, Vodafone, & E-Plus in France because of weak encryption used, & they found that Telecom Italia’s TIM & Wind did not encrypt information at all, while Vodafone Italia used weak encryption, according to the document.
reason operators don’t use encryption is to be able to monitor traffic, filter viruses, & detect & suppress Skype, they told the newspaper.