Breaking NATO Radio Encryption [video]
media.ccc.de
media.ccc.de
That is to say, if you want to crack NATO communiques your first step is to not call them up and ask for the goods.
Whether this is ethically good or not is tangential and an exercise left to each reader.
It's probably a case of 'nobody cares too much'. The standardization process is very long and the industry probably had already put them into their equipments.
ALE is not used that much and from what I can gather manual frequency establishment is often preferred. I'm not sure what the actual operational impact of this DoS would be, and if some spoofing is possible, but the actual communication is encrypted by different protocols depending on the type of comms (RATT, IP-like, Voice) so actually deciphering comms wouldn't be possible.
See Jerry Proc's website (https://jproc.ca/crypto/) for background knowledge.
Anyway, IDRTFA, but I hope this was at least reported before the release of the talk. This sort of thing could get a lot of people killed.
NATO is not at war. People aren't dying.
And I wouldn't be surprised if it's at least partly used to "leak" info to other state actors. Part of the cold war not turning hot was the mutual understanding of what went on in each block's military due to espionage. Without that, things could easily misinterpreted (and almost did a couple times like with able archer, which emphasizes the importance of this).
Some things could not be shared officially but leaving it out in a not-fully-unbreakable form might well have been a way of hinting the enemy about intentions.
Ahem, NATO countries are assisting Ukraine in drone and missile attacks on Russia as we speak and foolishly floating the idea of adding Ukraine to NATO. Russian leadership has repeatedly said stuff along the lines of "Make no mistake, we are at war with NATO because Ukraine alone doesn't have the capabilities to do what it's been doing to attack us." So yes, NATO is essentially at war.
Nobody in NATO is seriously suggesting Ukraine be added to NATO, especially right now.
>While eastern European countries say some sort of a road map should be offered to Kyiv at a NATO summit in Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, the United States and Germany are wary of any move that might take the alliance closer to war with Russia.
"Some" of NATO is clearly on board with it. The article says that the support must be unanimous, but I think we know who really runs NATO. At any rate, "some" of NATO is not "nobody in NATO" as you said. I could swear I hear these people talk about the issue every month or so.
Please be more specific than ‘they’. I’ll also remind you that journalists do not make policy, and policymakers don’t give a shit about journalists unless they’re trying to plant a story beneficial to them.
> "Some" of NATO is clearly on board with it. The article says that the support must be unanimous, but I think we know who really runs NATO. At any rate, "some" of NATO is not "nobody in NATO" as you said. I could swear I hear these people talk about the issue every month or so.
From the article you linked, emphasis mine:
‘While eastern European countries say some sort of a road map should be offered to Kyiv at a NATO summit in Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, the United States and Germany are wary of any move that might take the alliance closer to war with Russia.’
It doesn’t matter if Poland and Lithuania want Ukraine in NATO, lmao. The US is NATO, and they’re not going to admit a country into NATO that is currently at war with Russia, it would immediately trigger Article V… which would either destroy NATO, or the world.
Even if Ukraine won the war and Russia retreated, there is far too much corruption in Ukraine for it to seriously be considered for NATO and EU at this point in time.
A) are not that capable and did not know about it
B) knew about it, but sat on it for their own egoistical reasons
There’s also the “don’t ascribe to maliciousness what can be caused by bureaucracy“
The NSA if it knew about it most likely did disclosed the vulnerability, it was just deemed not significant enough to redesign, manufacture and re-issue millions of new radios.
These radios aren’t rated for secret communications anyhow. By the time you manage to decrypt what you want the information would likely be stale since all of the information passed over radios will be tactical in nature at best.
There are still other defenses like spread spectrum transmission and frequency hopping that make intercepts harder. The main threat model against radios isn’t actually message interception but rather basic SigInt that would be able to detect, identify and track transmissions.
On the battlefield that’s the most useful intelligence you’ll get especially during war time.
Any interception beyond that would take days if not weeks to be properly analyzed and disseminated this isn’t something that it done on a regiment or division levels.
- anything serious is probably highly classified as is everything relating to COMSEC.
- The standard seems to be a US-one used by NATO (MIL-STD as opposed to a STANAG).
- I know ALE is used for link establishment but maybe it's going to be superseded in the military for the next-gen radio equipment?
I am not a cryptography or digital radio expert, so grain of salt and all that.
Slide 14 shows real world feasibility, I think it's safe to say that while theoretically possible it's unlikely that this creates a significant real world issue. One bit of info I don't know - how long is a set of exchanged keys used for in most situations?
https://tosc.iacr.org/index.php/ToSC/article/view/9856/11598
Any attack taking years isn't going to be operationally relevant.
I suspect this protocol was developed basically as a computational complexity trade off to keep within those sorts of boundaries.