Thu 3 Jul 2008
How To Make Your Phone Untappable
Thursday, Jul 3rd, 2008 at 6:29 amCategories: Cryptography; Telephones; Zimmermann, Philip
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Philip Zimmermann is the author of ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. So far, not even teams of supercomputers and cyberspies at the National Security Agency have cracked ZRTP.
Zimmermann spoke with Forbes recently about the future of internet telephony, also known as Voice Over IP (VoIP):
With traditional telephony, our threat model was mostly government wiretapping. With VoIP, anyone can wiretap us: the Russian mafia, foreign governments, hackers, disgruntled former employees. Anyone.
Historically, there’s been an asymmetry between government wiretapping and everyone else wiretapping that’s been in the government’s favor. As we migrate to VoIP, that differential collapses. The government itself is just as vulnerable. Wiretappers can reveal details of ongoing investigations, names and personal details of informants, conversations between officials and their wives about what time they pick up their kids at school.
… Everyone thinks that VoIP is the future of telephony. It’s cheaper, more versatile, more feature-rich. So technological pressure herds us towards VoIP; we’ll have to encrypt it. Wiretapping will become so easy that the criminals — not just governments — will be able to do it routinely. There will be insider trading, blackmail, organized crime spying on judges and prosecutors, key witnesses killed before they can testify.
- Phillip Zimmermann, interview @ Forbes (03.18.08) : Link.
ZFone Project
“Zfone is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make encrypted phone calls over the Internet. Its principal designer is Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which has a better architecture than the other approaches to secure VoIP.”
Zfone is open source, and it’s free. Link.