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GSM on death bed - EFF warning

"GSM, the technology that underpins most cellphone communications around the world, uses a deeply flawed security technology," reports the Electronic Freedom Foundation today, in its top ten warnings for 2010.

In 2010, says the warning, "devices which intercept phone calls will get cheaper and cheaper. Expect to see public demonstrations of the ability to break GSM's encryption and intercept mobile phone calls."

In a detailed analysis, the 26th Chaos Communication Congress wrote:

The worlds most popular radio system has over 3 billion handsets in 212 countries and not even strong encryption. Perhaps due to cold-war era laws, GSM's security hasn't received the scrutiny it deserves given its popularity. This bothered us enough to take a look; the results were surprising. 

From the total lack of network to handset authentication, to the "Of course I'll give you my IMSI" message, to the iPhone that really wanted to talk to us. It all came as a surprise – stunning to see what $1500 of USRP can do. Add a weak cipher trivially breakable after a few months of distributed table generation and you get the most widely deployed privacy threat on the planet. 

Eff says "We hope that this will prompt the mobile phone industry to replace its obsolete systems with modern and easy-to-use cryptography."