<story><title>Gemalto&apos;s findings of its investigations into the alleged hacking of SIM cards</title><url>http://www.gemalto.com/press/Pages/Gemalto-presents-the-findings-of-its-investigations-into-the-alleged-hacking-of-SIM-card-encryption-keys.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scintill76</author><text>Can anyone elaborate on why it&amp;#x27;s supposedly only a problem for 2G?  &amp;quot;If someone intercepted the encryption keys used in 3G or 4G SIMs they would not be able to connect to the networks and consequently would be unable to spy on communications.&amp;quot;  Why not?  I feel like there is a &amp;quot;merely&amp;quot; missing from this sentence -- if so, what more than keys do they need to spy?&lt;p&gt;Are they basing this on the specific type of key discussed in the documents?  I don&amp;#x27;t know a lot about it, but I&amp;#x27;m inclined to believe there are valuable keys burned-in to 3G+ cards too.&lt;p&gt;I also wonder if there is a downgrade attack to force 2G, so that those keys are not completely worthless.</text></comment>
<story><title>Gemalto&apos;s findings of its investigations into the alleged hacking of SIM cards</title><url>http://www.gemalto.com/press/Pages/Gemalto-presents-the-findings-of-its-investigations-into-the-alleged-hacking-of-SIM-card-encryption-keys.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r0h1n</author><text>Firstly, I&amp;#x27;m amazed that a large global corporation has put out a press release saying it has &amp;quot;reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened.&amp;quot; Wow.&lt;p&gt;That said, I wonder if Gemalto really had any other option than to say its keys weren&amp;#x27;t stolen. What might be the cost of replacing all affected SIM cards?</text></comment>