Police Admit Leak Due to Fault in Crypto System in Slovenia

The Director General of Police Marjan Fank has confirmed that the TETRA communications network is under investigation, but that key information was not leaked.

The intrusion into the TETRA network, which is also part of the police communications and is used by the  Army, was first reported by the web portal podcrto.si.

The penetration may have occurred due to transmission errors when programming the encryption keys into the TETRA radio terminals. As the system is able to operate in both an encrypted and unencrypted mode, in this case, there were some unencrypted conversations that normally shold have been protected.

According to police, the error occurred in extremely rare cases - from 25 to 92 Communications per month from the total of 150,000 police communications on a monthly basis.

Today, a significant part of Slovenia still operates with an old (non encrypted) analog radio system, as in many locations the TETRA system is still not implemented.

So far, 12.9 million Euro has already been invested in the TETRA system. The majority between 2003 and 2007. In 2008, the construction of the network was put to a hold and today after 12 years the network has still not been completed.