| Home : July 24 2013 Computer News : SIM card vulnerabilities easy to fix, researcher says |
|
SIM card vulnerabilities easy to fix, researcher says |
July 24, 2013
A pair of severe security problems in millions of SIM cards should be easy for operators to fix, according to the German security researcher who found the issues.Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs in Berlin previewed research earlier this week that millions of SIM cards are likely still using an outdated, 1970s-era form of encryption to authenticate over-the-air (OTA) software updates.Nohl found it was possible to trick some kinds of SIM cards into divulging an encrypted 56-bit DES (Data Encryption Standard) key, which can be decrypted using a regular computer. He discovered that by sending a bogus OTA update to a phone, some SIMs returned an error code containing the weak key.A device could then be sent spyware which accesses critical phone data through the card's Java Virtual Machine, a software framework present on almost every SIM sold worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045093/sim-card-vulnerabilities-easy-to-fix-researcher-says.html#tk.rss_all
|
|
|
|
|
