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Company Makes Inconspicuous Secure Cellphone
dponce80 writes "With concerns over privacy at an all-time high, it's refreshing to hear that Swiss company VectroTel is making a secure mobile phone. The X8 encrypts secure calls (the unit is also able to make regular calls) with a virtually unbreakable 128-bit key, itself generated through a Diffie-Hellman exchange. While transmission does get somewhat delayed, communication is secure."
Except anyone who uses one would probably be labelled a terrorist.
I think it's asking to be broken, and I bet it will be.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
Since this cellphone is made in Switzerland, a country that presumably has differing cell phone communication standards than the US does, is it possible to buy and use this cellphone in the US with a normal US carrier? Or would we have to wait and hope for a company to build something similar for the US?
Thanks, and sorry for the ignorance.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
DH is a way to exchange an encryption key over a public network, but it doesn't tell you who you are talking to. GSM calls are never point to point, so there is always a "man in the middle".
I'm not saying it's necessarily snake oil, but the lack of any details certainly doesn't inspire any confidence.
Uhm... you should realize the pin code is on the phone, securing access to the crypto functions of that specific phone... if you want to listen in without being a part of the conversation you will still have to break the session key.
This is all great but can you trust the person sitting next to you on the bus? The stranger behind you? How many of us have eve's dropped on other peoples conversations?
Cheap UK and US VPS
"Millions if not billions of our tax money wasted if this technology becomes widely adopted."
You're looking at it the wrong way. Millions if not billions of our tax money that doesn't have to be wasted spying on innocent people chatting with their friends.
Sorry, but your surveillance apologism really demands that reply. You don't make innocent civilians safer by placing them under surveillance. You make them less safe. Stop wasting our time, money, and freedom when you should instead be spying on actual criminals, you know, getting a warrant based on probable cause and investigating to ascertain guilt. That is, if you're really interested in catching guilty parties and not just subjugating everyone under your militaristic future fantasy.
To paraphrase the saying, "it's not paranoia if you're actually being watched."
The reason to encrypt is not to make it impossible for investigators to hear you -- because, as you said, they can bug you in some other way. The reason is to make it impractical to do widespread monitoring of innocent people. When all calls are encrypted, investigators have to do a little actual work to bug a call, so it's impossible to instantly tap all the innocent callers as they'd like.
And if you've been following current events at all, you'll notice that a large portion of America isn't nearly as "paranoid" as it should be.
This seems like a neat little gizmo but I doubt I'll be able to convince my girlfriend, father, sister, friends, etc. to buy one too -- so the encryption feature would actually do something. As nice as the idea is, you still need two of these phones for it to work.
There's a parallel problem with GPG or the like. Since very few people have or want to use it, sending unencrypted e-mail is the only way to communicate with most of the world.
This phone is worse than that, though, since I can download GPG/cyrpto-software-of-your-choice and even install it for someone and show them how to use it -- but I'd have to persuade them to spend money on new hardware (and then convince them to actually use it with the crypto on!) in order to use the features of this phone.
Apathy/Laziness: 1
Discerning Citizens: 0
I think the above post should be taken in the spirit it was written: as a good joke suitable for chuckles all round. Would that I had mod points to mod it funny. Possibly we should petition /. to create a new type of modifier: ironic, but I fear its subtlety would be lost upon the majority.
Just in case the parent was not tongue in cheek:
Is it only myself for whom liberty from large entities (like the Goverment) is worth purchasing with a risk? Didn't many brave souls die for this in the past and continue to do so? Isn't that the bargain: liberty (and eternal vigilance), or the illusion of security?
Not only you are Anonymous, but these were spoken like a true Coward!!!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
would you be happy then if the "government" listened in on your phonecalls with your lawyer? or your tax attorney? or your doctor? or your psychiatrist? or your stockbroker? or your mistress? or your wife? or your election campaign manager? or any of a myriad of things you would rather not get out into public or potentially be used against you?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Obviously.
If he truly hadn't heard the Verizon guy, he wouldn't have answered anything at all, hehe.
given that the government has become essentially a division of Corporations R Us, think about how you might feel if the government sold the conversation you had with an oncologist to your HMO.
Freedom requires sacrifice. Better a hundred 9/11 than fascism and intrusion. And I say that being born and bred a New Yorker who grew up in the shadows of the WTC, supported the first Gulf War, and votes on the issues, not a straight party line.
In other words, live a good clean life, ignore outside influences, pay your taxes on time and you will have little to worry about; Like me :)
In other words, be completely boring, never upset the status quo, never fail to kow-tow to any government officials you meet (just in case) and be insignificant enough to escape notice and you're fine. Yeah, great plan. You'd do just fine as a serf in medieval europe too.
Who cares if the lord can fuck you in the ass whenever they want, so long as you are ugly and unimportant they won't bother.
Now if there were just a handful of these cell phones being used, the NSA could (probably) handle that and decrypt them.
It's unlikely they could. Assuming the key exchange works properly, and assuming they're using a known good algorithm (such as Rjindael aka AES), the NSA has no shot. Assume they use AES. Default is 128 bits and 10 rounds. Then the following little blurb from Apple's website applies:
AES gives you 3.4 x 10^38 possible 128-bit keys. In comparison, the Digital Encryption Standard (DES) keys are a mere 56 bits long, which means there are approximately 7.2 x 10^16 possible DES keys. Thus, there are on the order of 10^21 times more possible AES 128-bit keys than DES 56-bit keys. Assuming that one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second, it would take that machine approximately 149 trillion years to crack a 128-bit AES key.
(To put that into perspective, the universe is believed to be less than 20 billion years old.)
Now, that assumes you can crack a DES key in a second. The fastest successful crack by Deep Crack was just shy of 24 hours, or, 86400 seconds.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
So, let's say you're chatting with a friend, and he mentions how bad he things random wiretapping is.
That gets flagged as a potential terrorist conversation.
Since he's talking to you at the time, you both get investigated.
They find out that that one weird cousion of yours recently travelled to Italy, and by concidence a known terrorist contact was also in Italy.
You now look like the perfect cover, and warrant a REAL investigation... ie, asking your neighbors and employer questions.
Since they've been asked, and "they wouldn't be asking if there wasn't something to worry about", you are now suspected by your neighbors.
So, they've talked to you boss as well, who recalls that you were late coming back from lunch awhile back. (You're wife's prenatal checkup ran a little long) That story checks with the gov't, but they, naturally, never call your boss back to tell him.. so he's now a little suspicious.
You can't guarantee none of this could ever happen. (And you know the old byline... with the government, any possible abuse is a guaranteed abuse at some point. Do you want to be THAT guy?)
However, if they didn't pick up on the original conversation, that completely removes the most probable vector for something like this happening.