Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

PGP Creator's Zfone Encrypts VoIP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the so-stupid-easy-i-can-use-it dept.

Philip Zimmermann, creator of PGP wrote in to tell me about Zfone, his new system for encrypting any SIP VoIP voice stream. His first release is Mac & Linux only. I tested it with him using Gizmo as our client and it was pretty trivial to use. While it should work on most any SIP compatible VoIP client, he hopes that clients like OpenWengo and Gizmo will incorporate Zfone directly into the UI. Zfone has no centralization, and has been submitted to the IETF. He hasn't yet determined a license, but he believes strongly in releasing source code for all encryption products. A windows client is forthcoming.

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Encryption is hard by user9918277462 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because encryption is very difficult to do correctly. And we should all know by now that a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.

    There's also the not insignificant fact that encryption is complex to use and administer. Adding in robust encryption is not free from a user-friendliness perspective. Much thought has to be put into reducing the user-visible complexity as much as possible so that the user base will actually use the encryption, and use it in such a way that security is preserved. Not trivial.

  2. Re:Why not use OpenSSL? by rodac · · Score: 5, Informative

    VoIP is different from most other traffic types in that it is hard realtime and needs real low latency. This means VoIP uses UDP

    OpenSSL builds encrypted sessions over TCP. TCP is not designed to work well for the requirement space needed by VoIP.
    If fact, it just would not work well at all.