German Crypto Mobile Announced

XMLGuy writes "The first German crypto mobile phone is to be built by Rohde and Schwarz - a company that took over the hardware-crypto segment of Siemens at the beginning of May this year. At the push of a button the mobile phone (they are called "handies" here in Germany) will set up an encrypted communications link with your communications partner. According to heise online, the mobiles then use a 128 bit key to encrypt the channel. One of the technicians is quoted as saying that "A thousand pentium computers would need over 10 years to decrypt a 10 minute phone-call". The mobiles will cost around 6000 German Marks. " You know where the the fish is for translation.

Comments

A better way to do this?

[E1ven]

or- Distributed mobile phones.

An Idea that I've been kicking around in my head for a while is the concept of a distribted mobile phone. Each Phone acts as a transmitter for your call, and a forwarder for other calls.
Thus, as the number of phones sold increases, so does the total range of the system.

Such an infrastructure would be, in a similiar way to the internet, very resistant to attack, and the loss of nodes would not defeat the entire network.

To handle encrpytion, such as in the article, two phones could by sync'ed, via an infrared channel (when the two persons were physically close together), upon which point they would exchange their respective public keys.

To get from Phone A to Phone E, the message hops out, from phone to phone, looking for way to phone E.
Each hop, it increases it's HTL by one.
When it arrives at the Phone E, E checks the HTLs of messages that arrive, and then sends back a message that attempts to take a similiar route.
(ie, if a node is missing, it will hop around, looking to get back ont he chain, or, to get back to phone A)

Does this sound like a viable phone model?


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