Breaking GSM with rainbow Tables

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and distribution of rainbow tables that enable rapid GSM encryption breaking, highlighting the potential for widespread security vulnerabilities in a widely used communication protocol.

Contribution

It introduces an open-source, distributed approach to breaking GSM encryption using rainbow tables, making the attack accessible to the public and pressuring protocol upgrades.

Findings

GSM encryption can be broken in 30 seconds with specialized hardware.

Rainbow tables enable rapid decryption of GSM signals.

The attack method is now publicly available for widespread use.

Abstract

Since 1998 the GSM security has been academically broken but no real attack has ever been done until in 2008 when two engineers of Pico Computing (FPGA manufacture) revealed that they could break the GSM encryption in 30 seconds with 200'000$ hardware and precomputed rainbow tables. Since then the hardware was either available for rich people only or was confiscated by government agencies. So Chris Paget and Karsten Nohl decided to react and do the same thing but in a distributed open source form (on torrent). This way everybody could "enjoy" breaking GSM security and operators will be forced to upgrade the GSM protocol that is being used by more than 4 billion users and that is more than 20 years old.