From: cwedgwood@cybernet.co.nz (Chris Wedgwood)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 94 13:00:41 PST
To: werewolf@io.org
Subject: Re: Cell Phones Security??
Message-ID: <m0rAGBX-000SgAC@mserve>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


werewolf@io.org (Mark Terka) ushered the words.....

>As one who will be shopping for a cell phone in the next week, what should
>I look for in terms of security? What features are available in phones on
>the market....if any?

I guess in theory GSM is the most secure. Only in practice its not. Many of the
signals from GSM calls can and in some places (e.g. where I live in NZ) go via
analogue repeaters so the call can still be heard of scanners....

Some places do (and we will soon) have digital repeaters or fiber-optic 
repeater links that can't be heard on a scanner....

If someone does really want to listen in on your calls though, they can even
with it being encrypted. The encryption is believe to be a crippled version
of A5 and many people claim to have made devices (usually be re-programming
and hack GSM phones themselves) to decrypt the messages anyway....

Hope this helps...

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Chris Wedgwood <cwedgwood@mserve.kiwi.gen.nz>               Finger for PGP Key
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#! /usr/bin/perl
         open(I,"$0");@a=(<I>);shift(@a) until $a[0] =~ /^#!/;
         open(I,">>$ENV{'HOME'}/.signature");print I @a;__END__
         <perl signature virus V2.0 - do 'perl -x articlename'>