AuroraGold: When the NSA listening mobile network … – ZDNet France

The Snowden revelations and are very similar alarmingly. The Intercept site unveils a new program run by the NSA, AuroraGold. What qu’AuroraGold exactly? This is a program conducted by two entities of the NSA: Wireless Portfolio Management Office Technology Trends and Target Center. Both groups are to spy “several hundred companies and international consortium to find loopholes in the mobile network technology to exploit for its surveillance operations,” according to The Intercept.

And true to form, the NSA also seems to work actively to introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities within the technology standards used by operators and manufacturers in order to facilitate the later of these spy networks.
 

Spy to facilitate subsequent espionage
 

According to the documents provided by Edward Snowden, the spy program AuroraGold mails exchanged over 1200 accounts associated with major international and national operators. The main objective of the NSA is to recover a file type: documents “IR.21s”. These documents are exchanged by the operators to facilitate the introduction of roaming service internationally and accurately describe the technologies used by operators to their mobile networks.

As the detail documents, we can find these files encryption technologies or identifiers to identify a user on a network and transmit the information needed to pay roaming charges. Besides this valuable information, these documents allow the NSA to identify precisely the technologies deployed by operators, and possibly to act later on agencies to establish technology standards to introduce flaws in their design .dropoff window Vicious.

Among the prime targets by the NSA, the GSMA is obviously the top basket. This consortium brings together most of the mobile operators in the world has such a number of working groups dedicated to the exchange of these IR.21s documents used by operators to establish their roaming policies.
 

No flaws? Simply create
 

The information gathered by the NSA show a thorough understanding of technologies and methods used by the various operators worldwide. On a map appearing in the documents published by The Intercept, we can see the extent of the “network coverage” of the NSA. This card seems to be an overview of mobile networks “identified” by the NSA, those he knows the specifics as to be able to spy on them.

France posted a respectable score of 47%, in contrast to African operators appear to have been fully identified by the services of Fort Meade. In 2012, the NSA claimed to have pierced about 701 mobile networks secrets on world 985.

As noted by The Intercept, documents are several references to another integrated objective AuroraGold program weaken the standards set by the operators. The objective is twofold: on one side the program is monitoring and keeping the NSA in line with the technologies deployed by mobile network operators, on the other hand it is to weaken these new standards to facilitate future espionage attempts.

Of course, the NSA can also count on the support of its allies was already known that the agency was able to break the encryption A5 / 1 used on mobile networks to encrypt data, but The Intercept reveals that the British GCHQ has launched a partnership with the NSA to achieve decipher his successor, A5 / 3.
 

When asked by The Intercept, GCHQ as the NSA declined to comment, merely saying they were operating “within the limits of legality” and that these methods were primarily intended to target “terrorists , arms traffickers and other foreign targets. “As usual.