Slashdot Mirror
Zimmermann, Encrypted VoIP, and Uncle Sam
An anonymous reader noted that Phillip Zimmermann and his VoIP encryption software are the subject of a NY Times article today. The article touches on the FCC, privacy, and related issues. Given all the suspicious behavior of the Bush Administration relating to wiretaps and phone records, this sort of thing is all the more important to be very aware of.
Really, I mean why do people wear clothes for that matter? I mean we are all made of meat covered in skin. We all know what human bodies look like. Everyone should just go naked from now on. Who needs privacy when you have nothing to hide?
Phil took an open source VOIP client and added encryption to it. By his own admission, he doesn't know much about how to make VOIP work well, codecs and all that. But his encryption is very clever. It uses Diffie-Helman to generate a per-session key, which is stored in a completely volitile way. i.e. it is destroyed after the call terminates and cannot be retrieved (stored in memory which is then overwritten). So, even if a man (or government) in the middle records the RTP stream and then gets a search warrant to get the key to decrypt the call, it won't be there.
Look for his techniques for peer to peer key setup, which again is very clever and well thought out, to be used in a variety of new ways. I expect you will see a bit-t client soon that can also generate this one time session key between peers. It will be much more computationally intense than what you see bit-t clients like Azureus do to the CPU now, but no more than using S/FTP. Well, maybe more, because of the number of keys being setup and destroyed and the memory allocation needed in a swarm situation. But for peer to peer calls, it's strong and I expect that Phil, who was nearly bankrupted by Uncle Sam, trying to defend himself, will again be the NSA crosshairs. The guy is just a warrior, what can you say? Guys like him and Klein who blew the whistle on AT&T are the ones fighting for privacy and against a police state. And they will not be treated kindly by this administration.
I wish Cryptome would not redistribute my Zfone software. This morning I had to upload a new version due to a last minute mistake we made before the release, and Cryptome probably got the uncorrected version. This is beta software in flux, rapidly changing with new updates likely, especially shortly after it hits when we discover early problems. Further, I've just added critical warnngs to my web site about how to do the installation for Windows, and if someone grabs the software and posts it somewhere else, it will lack those warnings. There are good reasons why I want to maintain control of the distribution, especially during the initial public beta. --Philip Zimmermann (prz@mit.edu)
This is an excellent article that rebuts your argument that is both concise and eloquent: http://wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html?tw=wn _index_23
Although the US has ended most of their export controls for crypto software, there are still some reasonable export controls in place, namely, to prevent the software from being exported to a few embargoed nations, such as North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Sudan. And for commercial encryption software that you actually pay for (not this free public beta), there are now requirements to check customers against government watch lists as well, which is something that companies such as PGP comply with these days. PGP Corp volunteered to host the public beta software on their server, with all the appropriate checks in place. That's why you have to register, to make sure you are not in an embargoed country, to keep me in compliance with U.S. export laws. Been there, done that. -Philip Zimmermann