Police encryption may be encrypted easily

For this reason, Murgatroyd noted that Tetra radio buyers are free to spread other solutions to comprehensive encryption on their radio devices, but he admits that those produced by TCCA and are supported by ETSI “are widely used as much as we can say.” “

Although Tetra radio devices are not used by the police and the army in the United States, the majority of the police forces around the world use them. These include police forces in Belgium and Scandinavian countries, as well as Eastern European countries such as Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria and Macedonia, and in the Middle East in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. It is also used by the defense ministries in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Syria, as well as the Polish Military Control Agency, the Finnish Defense Forces, and intelligence services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, it is not clear how many of these also spread to a softe to end with their radio devices.

The Tetra Standard includes four TEA1, Tea2, Tea3 and TE4 – can be used by radio manufacturers in different products, depending on the customer and intended use. The algorithms contain different levels of security based on whether radio devices will be sold in Europe or outside. Tea2, for example, is restricted for use in radio devices used by the police, emergency services, military agencies and intelligence in Europe. TEA3 is available for police services and emergency services used outside Europe, but only in countries that are considered “friendly” for the European Union. TEA1 is only available for radio devices used by public safety agencies, police agencies and army in countries that are friendly for Europe, such as Iran. But it is also used in critical infrastructure in the United States and other countries to communicate with the machine to the machine in industrial control areas such as pipelines, railways and electric networks.

All four Tetra encryption algorithms use 80 -bit key to secure communications. But in 2023 Dutch researchers revealed that TEA1 has a feature that causes its key to decrease to only 32 bits, allowing researchers to break it in less than a minute.

In the case of E2e, the researchers found that the implementation they examined begins with a safer key than that used in Tetra algorithms, but it is reduced to 56 bits, which may allow someone to decipher the sound and data. They also found a second security vulnerability that allows someone to send fraudulent messages or restart legitimate messages to publish wrong information or confusion to employees who use radio devices.

The ability to inject vocal traffic and restart the messages of all TCCA users, according to researchers. They say this is the result of defects in the design of TCCA E2EE instead of a specific application. They also say that “the final users of law enforcement” assured them that this defect is in radio devices produced by sellers, unlike Cibora.

But the researchers say that only a sub -group of comprehensive encryption users is likely affected by the reduced weakness because it depends on how to implement encryption in radio devices sold to various countries.