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Title: Encryption Made For Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/08/07/217234...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, researchers in
the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm
baked into radios used by critical infrastructure -- as well as police,
intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world -- that made any
communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping. When
the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which developed the algorithm,
advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end
encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of
their communications. But now the same researchers have found that at least
one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has
a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The
encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit
key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making
it easier to crack. It's not clear who is using this implementation of the
end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-
end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them. Wired notes
that the end-to-end encryption the researchers examined is most commonly used
by law enforcement and national security teams. "But ETSI's endorsement of
the algorithm two years ago to mitigate flaws found in its lower-level
encryption algorithm suggests it may be used more widely now than at the
time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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