REDUCED COMPLEXITY SUBSCRIBER IDENTITY MODULE CARD SECRET KEY RECOVERY SYSTEM

Abstract

Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) is a wireless radio technology used mostly on network communication. It is designed to overcome the challenges of analog communication. GSM evolved from 1G to 4GLTE and uses protocols to protect transmissions, which have shown to be susceptible to attacks. This fact has been proven based on several attacks such as narrow pipe attack, guess and determine attacks, side channel attacks, time memory trade off attacks and correlation attacks which have high computational complexities. Therefore a GSM traffic monitoring system (GTMS) is proposed to proffer a lower computational complexity attack. The system is made up of two basic modules: key retrieval and passive attack modules. The key retrieval module handles the recovery of secret key using a given random challenge on a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card through the injection of a malware and a reconstruction procedure. The reconstruction procedure reversed the permutation and butterfly structure used in the COMP128 algorithm by applying the mathematical concept of involution and inversing the appended butterfly structure. Next is the passive module that validated the correctness of the recovered key by creating a passive attack that compares the signed responses from the SIM and the improvised authentication center. The result obtained showed that the time and memory are O(n2) and O(log n) respectively, on comparing the proposed system to narrow pipe and partitioning attack; in terms of time and memory complexity, the proposed system had reduced time and memory complexities . The GTMS established a malware-based testing model for Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card secret key protection system provided by Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) Network Providers, with improved time and memory complexities.