Slashdot Mirror
Encrypted Cell Phone Hits the Market
notshannon writes "Reuters
reports
about a new cell phone which automatically
encrypts communications. Of course, the
matching handset will decrypt the message.
Security doesn't come cheap, around $4000
per pair, but it's probably as reliable as anyone
in these parts could wish. Favorite quote:
'We allow everyone to check the security for themselves, because we're the only ones who publish the source code,' said Rop Gonggrijp at Amsterdam-based NAH6.
Amusingly, the article cites government.nl and not
nsa.gov as the world's most prolific phone tapper."
It really doesn't matter if they are $4000... so where the original motorola brick phones. Hopefully these will give other companies ideas on how to make them better/faster/cheaper.
....for doing a PGP extension to Mailman.
The patch file alone is 56 KB... looks like they put in some effort on that one. Pretty cool.
The Army reading list
So.. you buy a pair at a time and these phones can only talk to each other securely? Or is there some way to exhange keys?
My sig can beat up your sig.
Are these available in the U.S.? The last time encrypted cell phones made the news there were no plans of selling them in the U.S.
" Security specialists in the Netherlands said the device could threaten criminal investigation by the Dutch police, which is one of the world's most active phone tappers, listening in to 12,000 phone numbers every year."
The article states "one of the world's most active phone tappers" not "the world's most active phone tappers". The US had fairly stringent policies against phone tapping citizens (ie the police and FBI, not the NSA). I'm sure the NSA is not giving out statistics on how many wiretaps it does a year, but the NSA is (supposedly) forbidden from investigating within the US.
Does anyone else find it weird that its collectively called "the Dutch police?" Are they referring to all local law officials or some national law enforcement agency? Just curious...
FSB, formerly known as KGB. On numerous occasions they've ordered the Russian phone companies to turn off even the weak GSM encryption and wiretapped whoever they wanted. They also release "proslushki" (wiretaps) of some politicians talking on the phone on some "independent" web sites almost weekly. BTW, in Russia they don't need the warrant issued by a court to do this. Basically every god damn cop can wiretap whoever he wants if he has the gear. Too bad the use of cryptography (except for the government-approved algorithms) is not allowed in Russia.
is it just me, or couldn't this type of thing be done using current devices with an update to the unit'ss firmware. I mean, certainly if my Toshiba CMD-9500 has the horsepower to play the latest Eminem song as a ring tone then it can do some basic encryption of my text messages and voice conversations. I'm not talking about 1024bit NSA level security, I mean just enough to keep that kid with a frequency scanner from hearing my girlfriend talk dirty to me. Just a thought.
Now imagine a steganography-capable cell phone! The wire-tapping people wouldn't even know the call is encrypted and just hear a totally different conversation.
(And yes - if someone tries to patent this, this counts as prior art)
Nobody verifys keys for webpages, email or ssh right now. How many times have you seen "HOST KEY HAS CHANGED" or "host key not found" and typed "yes" anyway?
Nobody? Maybe the people who don't care. I use SSH for a reason. I never thought that someone would try to do anything malicious until a week ago. A week ago, someone in my dorm tookover my i.p. and had a sshd running. I was connecting to it from another computer in the same building, and I got PuTTy's friendly warning about the host key changing. What did I do? I clicked abort, exited the program, went back to my room, and investigated the incident. Anyway, my point is that I hope most people don't blindly click OK.
Gongrijp knows what he's talking about. He was one of the founders of Hacktic magazine, a "magazine for techno-anarchists" that was published from 1989 till 1994. Hacktic publications included schematics for pay television descramblers, detailed expositions of operating system vulnerabilities, articles on "social engineering" (I think they might even have coined the phrase), and numerous topics on hacking the phone company ("phreaking") and war dialing.
These guys have also organized some huge hacker conferences such as Hacking at the End of the Universe in 1993 and Hacking In Progress in 1997 (I was there in '97). Later Hacktic professionalized and they became the first ISP in the Netherlands. Still later that turned into XS4ALL, probably the best ISP in the Netherlands.
Through everything, Gongrijp ("Public Enemy #1") was a driving force. If he says the phone is secure, then that's a pretty damn strong endorsement.