It’s been as long as 21 years now that the A5/1 encryption has been used to protect the privacy of calls made over GSM networks. The code has been cracked by one 28 year old German who goes by the name of Karsten Nohl. He has presented the flaws in the existing code quite well and also states that his focus is the improvement of protection of GSM networks. His work has however been termed as ‘illegal’ by London based group, GSM Association, who, at the same time, feel that it doesn’t really threaten the current encryption scheme used.

As users, we’re the ones who remain uninformed, uncertain about how easy it is for hackers to sniff our calls out. There’s a full report on our DailyTech.