What satellite network did he use, and did the Russians have access to the encryption keys?
Dudayev "was killed by a signal-guided missile" [1], an anti-radiation missile [2]. That doesn't require compromising the call's encryption any more than taking out a radar installation requires cracking its track algorithm.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120816090458/http://www.foreig...
Nowadays we have enough compute power in a laptop with connected SDR to render this moot security by obscurity.
Can you provide some sort of example of how a laptop+SDR was used to discriminate something equivalent to a military-grade DSSS signal (i.e. one in which the pseudo noise function and its parameters are classified)?
If you know the PN function, I agree that it is trivial to detect/recover the transmission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9RkPt6uVQ4 now add ability to do phase correlation
If that’s correct, it required decryption.
However, that Wikipedia page continues “Dudayev's phone signature and coordinates were also reportedly passed to the Russians by the NSA after U.S. President Bill Clinton's meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin”, so it may have been specifics of his phone (if so, what? Slight frequency and/or timing deviations that fingerprint a specific device?), not of his voice.
I've done some digging and this pretty important information (if true) was added unsourced in this edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dzhokhar_Dudayev&...
It probably should be removed without any kind of reference to corroborate it, it's been more than 15 years since that edit has been made and there is zero evidence for this.
Probably but not _necessarily_ - if someone's vocal cadence was somehow visible in the encrypted modulation then that could be an identifier.
How many satellite phones were operating in Chechnya at the time? It's not like the handset was beam forming or performing fancy modulations to look like static.
In the right frequency--in publicly known frequencies--the handset would shine like a torch.
To clarify: if a satellite phone of a particular manufacturer uses a known set of frequencies and is talking to a specific satellite and you know the rough area where you are looking for phones from that manufacturer you can filter out the rest of the electromagnetic radiation and then all you are left with is instances of phones of that type (or other devices using the same set of frequencies).
It's not quite as easy as picking out a torch at night and to get accurate coordinates you will need to do some more measurements and some math but this is all definitely doable, especially if the call lasts for more than a few minutes if the device you use to scan for the phone is mobile (such as on a plane) because with every passing second your baseline is getting longer (and thus your accuracy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding
Radio amateurs do this sort of thing for sport, it's called fox hunting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting ), and with experienced hunters it can be done pretty quickly if the target is stationary.
His big mistake was to be on the phone for just a little bit longer than it took for the plane to get there, on that day he spoke on the phone for 3 times as long as normal, 15 minutes as opposed to normally 5 or less.
Nobody said that encryption will save you from enemy knowing who you are, where you are, who you talking to, etc.
Like Nazis always ending their encrypted communications with 'Heil Hitler' making reversing the keys easier lol.
Although, for modern encrypted telecoms, I doubt this is as easy.
Network analysis or traffic analysis is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
It allows for instance for the de-anonymization of network nodes based on known nodes and it allows for determining which nodes in the network are more important than others.