Mobile Phone Communication Codes Cracked

The German scientist Karsten Nohl published his findings this week on the CCC (Chaos Communications Congress) in Berlin. The CCC is an annual hacking convention, which is being held in Berlin, Germany.

Normally, the GSM communication switches frequency regularly, and therefor it's hard to listen in, but if you can crack the frequency switching algorithm..... Which is exactly what Karsten Nohl and his team did.
They cracked the so-called stream-cipher A5/1 which protects the voice conversations, and published details off it on the CCC in Berlin.

The short story of his findings are that people (read: criminals, and remember the criminal part.....) are able to listen in on the GSM communication between the cell phone and the carrier.
Law enforcement departments have the ability to listen in (after a court order I hope) directly on the carriers network, so they don't need to go through the cracking process.

It's most likely that criminal organizations are interested in this, since they might be able to listen in on governmental departments. With that in mind was the following taken from the BBC news website;

The GSM Association (GSMA), which devised the algorithm and oversees development of the standard, said Mr Nohl's work would be "highly illegal" in the UK and many other countries.

Isn't highly illegal something you would associate with criminals??....... I'm sure that by declaring it "Highly Illegal" the criminals won't use it.... Add the following:

Using the codebook, a "beefy gaming computer and $3,000 worth of radio equipment" would allow anyone to decrypt signals from the billions of GSM users around the world, he said.

Signals could be decrypted in "real time" with $30,000 worth of equipment, Mr Nohl added.

and the average Joe can start listening in on his wife.

Guess it's time to remove the dust from the PGPfone.