Scientists from the National University of Defense Technologies of China have developed a new method of attack, allowing third parties to almost instantly access encrypted conversations on satellite phones in real time.

The method developed by specialists is directed against the GMR-2 satellite communication encryption standard (the latest version of GMR-1, GEO-Mobile Radio Interface), used by satellite communication operators.

A few years ago, a team of specialists from the Ruhr University in Bochum (Germany) announced the successful hacking of the GMR-2 encryption standard. While the study of German scientists aroused considerable interest, in practice the attack proved to be difficult to implement, since it took a long time to extract the encryption key.

In turn, the method of attack on GMR-2, presented by Chinese scientists, allows you to obtain an encryption key in a fraction of a second. According to the researchers, their attack is significantly different from that described by German specialists. Instead of trying to implement a plaintext attack, the Chinese team reversed the encryption process and developed a system that could identify the encryption key used by the satellite phone to encrypt the data by simply analyzing already encoded data sent from the device. Details of the attack can be found in the report of scientists.