I'm not sure what microfilm has got to do with this. Plenty of national libraries have extensive digital collections of various artifacts - books and even websites. Check out the National Library of Australia as an example: https://www.library.gov.au/discover/what-we-collect/archived...
Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.
> To me, this absolutely feels like a NOBUS vulnerability, if the SIM manufacturers and/or core network equipment vendors are in cahoots with the NSA and let the NSA take those keys, they can potentially listen in on all mobile phone traffic in the world.
This feels like the obligatory XKCD comic[1] when in reality there isn't any secretive key extraction or cracking...things are just sent unencrypted from deeper into the network to the three-letter-agencies. Telco's are well known to have interconnect rooms with agencies.
Firewalls in high security environments aren't just port/protocol based. You lock everything down - source ip/port and destination ip/port. You should know where it is coming from and where it is going to.
Right so all the stars need to align for it to go unnoticed - compromised server, firewall and other alerting/monitoring tools.
I would have thought one single unexpected packet in these high security environments would raise significant alarm bells and any anomaly would be found very quickly.
Why aren't these attacks constrained by normal corporate firewalls? How does a random server on a navy ship start contacting baddie.china.com without raising red flags?
That's an interesting way of selling this.