Tron

Boris Floricic (8 June 1972 – 17 October 1998), better known by his pseudonym Tron, was a German hacker and phreaker whose death in unclear circumstances has led to various conspiracy theories.

He is also known for his Diplom thesis presenting one of the first public implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption, the "Cryptophon".

Floricic's pseudonym was a reference to the eponymous character in the 1982 Disney film Tron.

Floricic was interested in defeating computer security mechanisms; amongst other hacks, he broke the security of the German phonecard and produced working clones.

He was subsequently sentenced to 15 months in jail for the physical theft of a public phone (for reverse engineering purposes) but the sentence was suspended to probation.

On the mailing list "tv-crypt", operated by a closed group of Pay TV hackers, Floricic reported about himself in 1995 that his interests were microprocessors, programming languages, electronics of all kinds, digital radio data transmission and especially breaking the security of systems perceived as secure.

He claimed to have created working clones of a chipcard used for British Pay TV and would continue his work to defeat the security of the Nagravision/Syster scrambling system which was then used by the German Pay TV provider "PREMIERE".

Later, American scientists outlined a theoretical attack against SIM cards used for GSM mobile phones.

Together with hackers from the Chaos Computer Club, Floricic successfully created a working clone of such a SIM card, thus showing the practicability of the attack.

He also engaged in cloning the German phonecard and succeeded.

While Floricic only wanted to demonstrate the insecurity of the system, the proven insecurity was also abused by criminals which led to the attention of law enforcement agencies and the German national phone operator Deutsche Telekom.

After Deutsche Telekom changed the system, Floricic tried to remove a complete public card phone from a booth by force (using a sledgehammer) on 3 March 1995 in order to, as he told, adapt his phonecard simulators to the latest changes.

He and a friend were, however, caught by the police upon this attempt.

Floricic was later sentenced to a prison term of 15 months which was suspended to probation.

"Cryptophon" (or "Cryptofon") was the name Floricic chose for his prototype of an ISDN telephone with integrated voice encryption.

In the winter term 1997/1998, Floricic successfully finished his studies and published his diploma thesis, in which he developed and described the "Cryptophon", an ISDN telephone with built-in voice encryption.

Since parts of this work, which were to be provided by another student, were missing, he could not finish his work on the Cryptophon.

His thesis, however, was rated as exceptional by the evaluating university professor.

After graduation, Floricic applied for work, but was unsuccessful.

In his spare time he continued, among other activities, his work on the Cryptophon.

Floricic was highly interested in electronics and security systems of all kinds.

He engaged in, amongst other things, attacks against the German phonecard and Pay TV systems.

As part of his research he exchanged ideas and proposals with other hackers and scientists.

It was created in the winter term 1997–1998 as part of his diploma thesis, titled "Realisierung einer Verschlüsselungstechnik für Daten im ISDN B-Kanal" (German, meaning, "Implementation of Cryptography for Data contained in the ISDN Bearer channel"), at the Technische Fachhochschule Berlin.

Floricic focused on making the Cryptophon cheap and easy to build for hobbyists.

The phone encrypts telephone calls using the symmetric encryption algorithm IDEA.

As IDEA is patented, the cipher was implemented on a replaceable daughter module which would have allowed the user to exchange IDEA for another (probably patent-unencumbered) algorithm.

In addition, the system was about to be supplemented with a key exchange protocol based on the asymmetric algorithm RSA in order to achieve security against compromised remote stations.

The Cryptophon is built on the foundation of an 8051 compatible microprocessor which controls the whole system and peripherals (e.g. ISDN controller, keypad and display).

For the cryptography, Floricic used cheap DSPs from Texas Instruments which he scrapped out of old computer modems, but which could also be bought at affordable prices.

As this type of DSP is not powerful enough for the cryptography algorithm chosen, Floricic used two of them for the Cryptophon – one for sending and one for receiving.

He planned to extend the phone so it would also be possible to encrypt data-connections.

Floricic developed both the operating software of the phone as well as the cryptography implementation in the DSPs.

He found a new way to implement IDEA to save significant processing time.

From December 2005 to January 2006, media attention was drawn to Floricic when his parents and Andy Müller-Maguhn brought legal action in Germany against the Wikimedia Foundation and its German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. The first preliminary injunction tried to stop Wikipedia from publishing Floricic's full name, and a second one followed, temporarily preventing the use of the German Internet domain wikipedia.de as a redirect address to the German Wikipedia.

Floricic grew up in Gropiusstadt, a suburb in southern Berlin (West Berlin at the time).

His interests in school focused on technical subjects.

He left school after ten years and completed a three-year Vocational education (Berufsausbildung) offered by the Technical University of Berlin and graduated as a specialist in communication electronics with a major in information technology (Kommunikationselektroniker, Fachrichtung Informationstechnik).

He subsequently earned the Abitur and began studies in computer science at the Technical University of Applied Sciences of Berlin.

During his studies, Floricic attended an internship with a company developing electronic security systems.