The new Kasumi cipher for 3G phone networks, not yet in commercial use, has already been cracked.

"In a paper published Tuesday, the cryptographers showed that the Kasumi cipher, which is also referred to as A5/3, can be broken using what's known as a related-key attack, in which a message encrypted with one key is later changed to one or more different keys," writes The Register's Dan Goodin. "The team dubbed the technique a sandwich attack because it was broken into three parts: two thick slices at the top and bottom and a thin slice in the middle."

"The paper was published by Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir, the last researcher being the S in the widely used RSA public-key encryption algorithm," Goodin writes. "They are faculty members with the Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel."

Click here to read the story at The Register.