Another attack on A5/1

A5/1 is a stream cipher used in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard. Several time-memory tradeoff attacks against A5/1 have been proposed, most notably the attack by Biryukov, Shamir and Wagner (1978), which can break A5/1 in seconds using huge precomputation time and memory. This article presents a completely different attack on A5/1, based on ideas from correlation attacks. Whereas time-memory tradeoff attacks have a complexity which is exponential with the shift-register length, the complexity of the proposed attack is almost independent of the shift-register length. Our implementation of the suggested attack breaks A5/1 in a few minutes using 2-5 min of conversation plaintext.