Secure Communication Comes To Android

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson's startup, Whisper Systems, has released a public beta of two Android applications that provide encrypted call and SMS capabilities for your Android phone. In the wake of recent GSM attacks, it'll be interesting to see if smartphones end up providing a platform that fundamentally changes the security we can expect from mobile communication."

Comments

Re:Disappointed that they released w/o source code

[Ungrounded Lightning]

What I'm more curious about is why there hasn't been (AFAIK) an app that uses an asymmetric public-key encryption method. The solution from TFA takes the combination of the users' keys to generate a password, ...

Public key encryption is crunch intensive - even in the good direction. (It's "effectively impossible" in the "bad" direction, which is the whole point.) Too crunch intensive to be practical when encrypting streams, even with current fast processors.

So it's usually used to generate and exchange a "session key" (and perhaps periodically replace it with a new one) for a symmetric cypher that takes less crunch and is "secure enough" if the amount of material it encrypts is limited.