NSA stole the keys to millions sim card and spying on employees in … – IDG.se

Gemalto is perhaps is not a brand that ordinary people are familiar with, but the Dutch company is the world’s largest manufacturer of sim card and delivers to 450 of the world’s mobile manufacturers.

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Now showing documents leaked by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, as the newspaper The Intercept have read, that US NSA and the British GCHQ commonly broken into Gemalto’s computers and bugged traffic between the company and operators To access the encryption keys, the company put into their sim cards.

It is unknown how many keys the two spy organizations put their hands on, but according to Snow Dens document so gathered 106 000 keys in and were matched to the supply of SIM cards to various operators only for four months around the turn of 2009/2010. But the total number of collected keys is probably considerably larger and in one of the documents describing the spies that they have access to Gemalto’s network. The document also describes that the NSA has the ability to handle between 12 million and 22 million keys per second, but not how many keys that have really been collected.

Gemalto’s CEO Paul Beverly told The Intercept that he had no knowledge of the company’s encryption keys ended up on the wave.

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The keys are called Ki-keys and supplied in pairs, one on SIM card and one mobile operator has in its network. They are used to encrypt calls in the mobile network and to identify which subscribers who connect to the networks. In the first GSM networks where encryption is used relatively easy to crack for those who want to monitor traffic, but in 3G and 4G networks use a stronger encryption that is complicated and takes more resources for intelligence services to crack. But with our own database of keys used to encrypt traffic so described it as a trivial matter to convert the encrypted communication to plain text.

Behind the operation against Gemalto is according Snowden documents a previously unknown organization in the NSA and GCHQ called Mobile Handset Exploitation Team, or simply soreness. The organization has in addition to steal keys from Gemalto also supervised the company’s employees both on Facebook and e-mail.

tenderness should also spying on others within the major telecom companies For example, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, several operators and even competitors Gemalto also manufactures simcard.

The thefts of codes to the sim card appears to be mainly of interest for espionage in countries where the two organizations have not already established relations with operators and therefore did not have access to customer conversations.