Cryptographers have devised a low-cost way to intercept phone calls and text messages sent over the majority of the world’s mobile network.

Demo took place at latest Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (last week) and require few hardware: four $15 Motorola handsets, a medium-end computer and a 2TB hard drive.

This method, developed by researcher Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Manaut, is based on A5/1 encryption crack demonstrated at last year Chaos Communication Congress and is an improvement over previous techniques which require two USRP2 receivers and software to rapidly change radio frequencies over a spectrum of 80 channels (and a $4.000 budget).

The revised attack uses home-brewed firmware to turn the Motorola phones into wire-tapping devices that pull conversations and text messages off of a carrier’s base station. They are connected to a PC that has access to a 2TB rainbow table used to decrypt messages protected by the decades-old A5/1 algorithm.

For more information you can refer to H-online.com and Wired.com have more technical details here and here.

Slides from the presentation are here.

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