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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."
We'll know it's at least OK if the FBI and CIA start lobbying congress to outlaw it.
We'll know it's pretty good if the NSA starts lobbying congress to outlaw it.
The government is absolutely convinced that law enforcement will come to a screeching halt if people can communicate casually without being subject to eavesdropping. This despite the courts' general distaste for such evidence (people rarely speak candidly in phone conversations regarding criminal enterprises and therefore establishing context and the meaning of codewords becomes a prosecutorial hurdle), and the paucity of successful prosecutions built primarily on the strength of intercepts.
So we've had cryptography treated as a munition. And clipper. And CALEA.
Of course, if the keys are on a server somewhere they can always just subpoena them.
While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.
These apps may not be useful to *you*, but they will certainly be useful to governments, a few companies, and some of the more vigilant/paranoid tin-foil hat wearers among us. In any case, what we need is a free open source solution that does encryption.
The number of Android users is not that big right now, but Android is coming very fast from behind, and with Google taking 0% of the commissions from their Market/App stores (leaving the entire 30% in perpetuity to the carriers/phone makers), I speculate that Android will really become the #1 dominant platform eventually.
It's a VOIP app that encrypts the audio. Except the fact that the protocol itself is documented this is not materially different from skype which is also encrypted and has governments apparently scrambling to crack.
A truly revolutionary app would encrypt the phone's mobile call audio.
Uh, so?
You know, telephones aren't terribly useful, either. Because the person on the other end has to have a phone as well. Completely impractical compared to yelling.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Me, my wife, and my daughter.
The reed player in my band (the other three players have iPhones or non-smart phones).
I was at a school board meeting earlier in the month and the soccer mom sitting next to me had a Droid. The kid who lives next door and who has bragged to me that he owns an Xbox, a PS3 and a Wii has an HTC android phone. He says "iPhones are for pussies".
I passed that last part along for informational purposes only. I do not endorse that sentiment in any way, mostly because I wouldn't want some offended iPhone user to give me such a slap.
You are welcome on my lawn.