[jrockway]

Yeah, you are right. The impression that I got from the NYT article was that this was "given a trace and a bunch of computers, you can get the voice data... maybe, eventually", but the impression that I get from the talk is that it is actually realtime. That requires weaknesses in the crypto that are embarrassing for anything 1980s or 1990s vintage. I don't think this attack would be feasible if they used DES instead. (I will defer to you or cperciva for that one, however :)

[siculars]

what i got from the 3c talk is that the data stream is on the order of 80MB/s (tx/rx, because they need to record the entire spectrum due to frequency modulation) and that currently they have not found a way, it seems due to lack of fpga programming skillz, to decode in real time. it seems like they are recording and then decoding some time later via their 2TB lookup table. Even with the 64bit keyspace the lookup table is 2TB because its a rainbow lookup which means that only certain values at certain intervals are stored.