Cryptography in mobile networks

Abstract:

Cryptography in mobile networks has over the last 15 years gone from security-by-obscurity to a more sound approach of using publicly scrutinized algorithms. I will give a brief history of cryptography in GSM and UMTS, and then focus on some quite interesting new algorithms for UMTS that have recently been developed by ETSI SAGE. In particular, the new integrity algorithm is based on an (unconditionally) provably secure construction. It is based on quite old but nice (and easy) results by Carter and Wegman, which for some reason have not started to see wider deployment until recently.