Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

Researchers in the Netherlands uncovered a deliberate backdoor in encryption used in radios for critical infrastructure, police, intelligence, and military, making communications susceptible to eavesdropping. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) recommended adding end-to-end encryption to mitigate the flaw. However, the same researchers found that one implementation of ETSI's endorsed end-to-end encryption also has vulnerabilities, compressing a 128-bit key to 56 bits before encrypting data, making it easier to crack. The users of this encryption implementation and their awareness of the security flaw remain unclear.