A security consulting firm revealed on Thursday that multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in the Terrestrial Trunked Radio equipment that is used by military, law enforcement, and infrastructure operators across the globe.
In a recent report, Midnight Blue, a security consulting firm, wrote, “After previously identifying several severe vulnerabilities in Motorola TETRA radios as part of our TETRA:BURST research, we were asked to scrutinize the Sepura SC20 series of mobile TETRA radios.”
“Several issues were encountered, two of which are deemed critical. All attacks require physical access to the device,” Midnight Blue added. “Now, over two years later, we publish (in limited detail) what we found, in order to inform all asset owners and stakeholders.”
According to Industrial Cyber, Midnight Blue’s new report on the 2023 vulnerability disclosure discovered three flaws in TETRA’s end-to-end encryption layer. Additionally, the security consulting firm discovered six other vulnerabilities.
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Industrial Cyber reported that TETRA’s end-to-end encryption layer provides an additional form of protection for special forces, intelligence agencies, covert units, and other sensitive users.
Midnight Blue confirmed that TETRA’s encryption services are used by military agencies and law enforcement officials in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
In Midnight Blue’s report, the security consulting firm documented three security loopholes, including a vulnerability that could allow an unauthorized user to perform “code execution” if they had physical access to the technology.
Carlo Meijer, a founding partner at the security consulting firm, said, “The weakened algorithm is particularly worrying, because it is vendor-agnostic and for users of this variant, any attacker with modest computing resources can break the E2EE layer and reduce security of the most sensitive TETRA communications to its Air Interface Encryption – which we have shown to suffer from critical flaws as well.”
