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Secure Voice Communications While Travelling?

Posted by Cliff on from the thwarting-eavesdroppers-everywhere dept.

captnitro asks: "My father works for the US Dept of Commerce in the Eastern Bloc. His hotel room phones are routinely bugged -- a few (former) coworkers have had their stays 'shortened' and politely asked to leave the country, when they said dumb things over the phone. A few days ago he asked me what I use for secure voice when I don't have broadband. Remembering PGPfone from a while back, I looked up the link, but apparently they're no longer supporting/distributing it. While I wouldn't recommend he say much of anything in a bugged room, it got me thinking -- what do *you* use for simple, no-nonsense (requiring modem + sound card), low-bandwidth secure voice app? Unix works, and scriptability gets geek points, but I'll take what I can get."

4 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. asterisk or gnuphone by tzanger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You could use gnuphone with a SSH or other VPN tunnel, or even a full blown asterisk point and use encrypted IAX transfers. Any old SIP phone would work too.

    All of these are IP solutions. Any decent pair of phone encoders (where you encrypt and decrypt the audio stream) would be a lower-tech solution that might work better.

  2. Linphone over SSH? by ThenAgain · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is something I've been meaning to experiment with myself for communicating with one of my clients with he's out of town.

    It seems like it should be possible to use Linphone (www.linphone.org) over an ssh tunnel. ssh compression may also help with the bandwidth constraint.

  3. whoever monitors this will feal like a moron by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Check this out. Many computer games now have built in voice communications such as the worlds most populat first person shooter video game: counter-strike a mod for half-life. Have your dad jump into the game join a server have his contact meet him in the server and they can talk secret navaho code over the ingame voicecoms. So that way #1. there would be no real way to disect the outgoing transmission for video/sound. and #2. make the people monitoring feal like complete morons.

    Yelling plant the bomb over coms and have the cops bust through the door only to see you playing a video game on a 32man public server.... pass me the dunce cap!

  4. Re:NSK 200 - Secure GSM/DECT phone by neonstz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    NATO Secret != Secret (or at least I think so).

    Nato levels are: NATO Restricted, NATO Confidential, NATO Secret and Cosmic Top Secret.

    To know stuff like missile and radar performance data etc you usually need NATO Secret.