Hey guys,
as some of you may have noticed, just recently at ShmooCon we gave our talk “LTE vs. Darwin” (Slides here). There we presented some results of our research in 4G telco network security. Some of those originate from our research contribution to ASMONIA, but we expanded the scope and also took a look at the air interface. Both the air interface and the backend links & protocols must be secured appropriately; otherwise communication may be eavesdropped or sensitive information may be compromised. In the following we want to provide an overview of LTE main components and potential attack vectors.
Hendrik Schmidt
ShmooCon 2014
Last weekend, from 17 to 19 January, ShmooCon was held in Washington, DC. A number of different topics was covered in great talks and we want to give you a short overview of the conference. In the following our favorite talks are briefly summarized.
Privacy Online: What Now?
Ian Goldberg, one of the designers of the OTR Protocol, gave the keynote on the first day. His talk was quite interesting and he presented some really nice approaches, one of those being an attack against PGP. He described the attack as follows: an attacker could copy a key server by downloading all the stored keys. If this is done it is possible to create new key pairs with exactly the same settings as the keys downloaded. The third step is to create all the signing links between the keys as they exist on the real key server. Finally, the attacker uploads these new keys including the signing links to the original key server.
Now, in case Alice wants to retrieve the public key of Bob, Alice would find two keys with seemingly identical properties. If choosing the wrong key for encryption the message will be decipherable by the attacker and in case of MitM situation be accessed. Furthermore, if Alice then signs the “mirror key”, the cloned keys and the original would merge, resulting in further problems.
This was just one consideration discussed in Goldberg’s talk. For the full content, watch the recording, available soon on ShmooCon page.
Some notes on 30C3
We wish you a happy new year and a good start to 2014. A new year has begun and, just before that, 30C3 took place. I think almost all of you have heard about the congress and its topics. In particukar there was Glenn Greenwald’s keynote or there were new publications/revelations by Jacob Appelbaum, which you will probably have heard about from main media.
But besides of all that, there were really a lot of other interesting talks we want to give you a short introduction to. Overall it was a really good conference this year and a lot of awesome talks. But, like always, it is not possible to see all of them, so here is a short summary of some of our favorites: