The WHY, the How, the What. An assessment of TETRA End-to-end (WHY2025)

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5d ago 48:20

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TETRA is a European standard for trunked radio used globally by police, military and civilian parties alike. In the past, we already published the hitherto secret inner workings of TETRA and on several of its severe security issues. We're now back to discuss the last crucial part of TETRA security - its optional (and costly) end-to-end encryption, reserved for the most sensitive use cases. We'll discuss in detail how we obtained and analyzed those elusive algorithms, and what we found. TETRA is a European standard for trunked radio used globally by police and military operators. Additionally, TETRA is widely deployed in industrial environments such as harbors and airports, as well as critical infrastructure such as SCADA telecontrol of pipelines, transportation and electric and water utilities. In previous research, we published [TETRA:BURST](https://www.midnightblue.nl/tetraburst), revealing vulnerabilities in the TETRA air interface encryption, and publishing the secret cryptographic primitives for public scrutiny. We now present all-new material, assessing the optional and often expensive end-to-end encryption, which adds an additional layer of encryption on top of the air interface encryption, a layer that can only be decrypted by the traffic's recipient, and not by the infrastructure. These solutions enjoy significant end-user trust and are intended for the most sensitive of use cases. While the ETSI standard on TETRA does facilitate integration of some E2EE solution, the solutions themselves are vendor-proprietary, and proved quite hard to obtain. The opaque nature of this solution and TETRA's history of offering significantly less security than advertised (including backdoored ciphers) is worrying enough, but given our previous TETRA:BURST research, E2EE is frequently mentioned as a potential mitigation. In order to shed light on its suitability, we decided to undertake the effort of reverse-engineering a TETRA E2EE solution. We'll discuss how we investigated the E2EE landscape, and how we (after being scammed on a Motorola device) managed to extract an implementation from a popular Sepura radio. We'll then discuss the E2EE design (that we have published on GitHub) along with a security analysis, identifying several severe shortcomings ranging from the ability to inject voice traffic into E2EE channels and replay SDS (short text) messages to an intentionally weakened E2EE variant, which reduces its 128-bit key to only 56 bits. In addition, we will discuss new findings related to multi-algorithm networks and official patches, relevant for asset owners mitigating the TETRA:BURST vulnerabilities previously uncovered by us. Finally, we will demonstrate the E2EE voice injection attack as well as the previously theoretical TETRA packet injection attack on SCADA networks. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/WSM3XV/

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