Our Phone Calls Are Insecure, And No One Is Doing Anything About It

Department of Computer Science Colloquium

Our Phone Calls Are Insecure, And No One Is Doing Anything About It

Dr. Christopher Soghoian
Yale Law School Visiting Fellow
American Civil Liberties Union 

Abstract: Some of the most widely used encryption algorithms that protect our cellular phone calls were designed in the 1980s and broken in the 1990s. In the decades since, computer security researchers have refined these attacks, ultimately demonstrating that phone calls and text messages can be intercepted with a few hundred dollars worth of off-the-shelf hardware and some open source soft-ware. Yet, in spite of the many research papers published and demonstrations at high-profile security conferences, little has been done. The phone companies, in the US and elsewhere, continue to operate networks that use weak crypto. These companies and government regulators that are responsible for communi-cations networks have neither warned the public about the insecurity of tradi-tional phone calls, nor advised them about the ways in which they can more se-curely communicate. Moreover, efforts by activists to obtain documents show-ing how these flaws are being exploited for surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence agencies have largely been blocked, as agencies claim that publish-ing that information will reveal classified information.

This talk, in part, is about the sorry state of our cellular communications net-works. But it is also about the total failure of the computer security community to influence public policy, particularly when opposed by law enforcement and in-telligence agencies, who want nothing to change and the public to be kept in the dark.

Bio: Dubbed the "Ralph Nader for the Internet Age" by Wired and "the most promi-nent of a new breed of activist technology researchers" by the Economist, Christopher Soghoian works at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. A leading expert on privacy, surveillance, and information security, Soghoian is currently the Principal Technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Thursday, April 9, 2015
4 pm
Linsly Chittenden Hall, LC 102 63 High Street
Sponsored by the Department of Computer Science 
Hosted by Dr. Bryan Ford