Don't Trust Satellite Phones: a Security Analysis of Two Satphone Standards
2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Don’t Trust Satellite Phones: A Security Analysis of Two Satphone Standards Benedikt Driessen, Ralf Hund, Carsten Willems, Christof Paar, Thorsten Holz Horst-Goertz Institute for IT Security Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany {benedikt.driessen, ralf.hund, carsten.willems, christof.paar, thorsten.holz}@rub.de Abstract—There is a rich body of work related to the standards like Universal Mobile Telecommunications System security aspects of cellular mobile phones, in particular with (UMTS), CDMA2000 (also known as IMT Multi-Carrier respect to the GSM and UMTS systems. To the best of our (IMT-MC)), or 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) exist and knowledge, however, there has been no investigation of the security of satellite phones (abbr. satphones). Even though a are continuously enhanced to meet the growing customer niche market compared to the G2 and G3 mobile systems, there demands. are several 100,000 satphone subscribers worldwide. Given the Cellular mobile networks require a so called cell site sensitive nature of some of their application domains (e.g., to create a cell within the network. The cell site provides natural disaster areas or military campaigns), security plays a all the necessary equipment for transmitting and receiving particularly important role for satphones. In this paper, we analyze the encryption systems used in radio signals from mobile handsets and the radio network. the two existing (and competing) satphone standards, GMR-1 For example, the cell site contains one or more sets of and GMR-2. The first main contribution is that we were able transmitter/receivers, the necessary antennas, digital signal to completely reverse engineer the encryption algorithms em- processors to perform all computations, a GPS receiver for ployed.
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