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General Radio Discussion / Re: Dangers posed by the increasing availability of low cost Software Defined Radio
« on: February 14, 2012, 1934 UTC »
Ehh. What's old is new again.
The line in the article that really bothers me is this: "thanks to SDR it’s no longer possible to assume that calls made over commercial and specialist wireless networks are inherently secure." That's bullshit: you could never assume they were inherently secure. SDR is just another potential avenue of attack on the radio-based portion of the data transmission; it completely ignores the fact that a compromise or abuse of the wireline infrastructure carrying the traffic after it has been received by the carrier would be far more effective and, in some ways, easier to accomplish.
It really reads like someone's trying to whip up a tempest in a teapot with this one. Sure, an SDR could be used for Evil Purposes(tm), but it's not like these attacks aren't already happening. I get that the idea was to show that the software component of the SDR has driven down the cost of the hardware, thus making it easier to acquire and implement - but there are other, better ways of attacking these standards. For now
The line in the article that really bothers me is this: "thanks to SDR it’s no longer possible to assume that calls made over commercial and specialist wireless networks are inherently secure." That's bullshit: you could never assume they were inherently secure. SDR is just another potential avenue of attack on the radio-based portion of the data transmission; it completely ignores the fact that a compromise or abuse of the wireline infrastructure carrying the traffic after it has been received by the carrier would be far more effective and, in some ways, easier to accomplish.
It really reads like someone's trying to whip up a tempest in a teapot with this one. Sure, an SDR could be used for Evil Purposes(tm), but it's not like these attacks aren't already happening. I get that the idea was to show that the software component of the SDR has driven down the cost of the hardware, thus making it easier to acquire and implement - but there are other, better ways of attacking these standards. For now