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We were pressured to weaken the mobile security in the 80's
Norway Created: 14 Jan 2014
Leaked Snowden documents that Washington Post has published, show that the US intelligence agency National Security Agency (NSA) breaks one of the encryption standards that are used to protect cell phones from eavesdropping.

Encryption is like a mathematical lock that prevents hackers and others from opening the encrypted content.

It is the A5/1-encryption standard which can be broken, a standard which is used by many cell phone users both in Norway and the rest of the world.

Here is the story about how the A5/1-encryption standard is much weaker than it probably could have been.
The birth of GSM

Experts from all over Western Europe came together in 1982 to build a new system for mobile telephones. The system was realised 10 years later, and is the one we now call GSM.

Jan Arild Audestad has been an employee of Telenor in many years and has also been a professor at Gjøvik Universty College and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

- Originally we proposed that the encryption key length should be 128 bit, because we knew little about cryptographic systems, and how secure they were. The request was that the keys and algorithms should be secure at least for 15 years after the installation, Audestad tells.

*SNIP*

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Source: Aftenposten, Arild Færaas, 09 Jan 2014

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