How safe is your network?

I was recently watching a video on youtube about GSM hacking (here) and it got me thinking, how safe are GSM networks and what can operators do to make them safer?

The first thing I looked at was the actual encryption algorithm itself. This is typically termed A5/X as there are a few different variants. A5/1 is the original encryption algorithm. A5/2 is a deliberate weakened version developed at a time when the standardisation community did not want to pass on the details of the A5/1 to certain non-trusted countries. A5/3 is the stronger version of A5/1. Finally A5/4 was recently introduced which is even stronger but still at its infancy in terms of support on UEs and deployment in live networks. So of all these options A5/3 sounds like the right choice to encrypt your voice calls. Right? Lets see..

First of all we need a device that supports A5/3. Even though the encryption algorithm has been around for a while, a lot of device manufacturers deliberately disable it. For the purposes of our testing I found a device that actually supported it as shown below.

Next we just need to make some voice calls and see which encryption algorithm the network instructs the device to use. The actual encryption is initiated via the RRC Ciphering Mode Command as shown below.

As can be seen the algorithm identity selected is 0. Looking at 3GPP TS 44.018 we find the table below which indicates that algorithm 0 equates to the older & and easier to crack A5/1. All 4 networks tested used A5/1.

The second thing to look at is how often is the ciphering key (termed Kc) is renewed. Obviously reusing the same key is bad practice and the ideal situation is to use a different cipher key for every call. The cipher key is generated by algorithm A8 using the RAND number and the individual subscriber key Ki. Ki resides in the SIM and RAND is sent via the Authentication procedure. It follows that in order to generate a new ciphering key Kc, the user needs to be re-authenticated. So how often does this happen?

Looking at operator 1, the same cipher key is re-used 7 times as shown below (only the messages of interest are shown and the rest are filtered).

Operator 2, seemed to have some random pattern of re-authenticating. This could be as low as once per call, but on other occasions the same cipher key was re-used 15 times.

Operator 3 had a regular pattern, re-using the same cipher key 15 times.

Finally operator 4 was the best of all re-using the same cipher key 5 times.

From an operators point of view of course, re-authenticating the user generates signalling load on the core network as the MSC/VLR has to fetch authentication triplets from the Authentication Centre. This explains why some operators are more or less generous with their cipher keys.

So what can you do as a subscriber to better protect yourself? Unless you have a trace tool, figuring out what ciphering algorithm your operator uses and how often the ciphering key changes is not something easy to find as operators do not make this information public. An easier choice would be to use the 3G network for your voice calls which means having a 3G device and finding a network that provides adequate 3G coverage. If you are are "brave" enough you could even lock you device to 3G only to prevent any accidental wandering to the 2G network. To date, to my knowledge, there have been no documented successful attacks on 3G networks.