Christian Odhner writes:

I'm sure most of you have seen some of the cheap (relatively speaking) 'phone scramblers' and such sold in local "spy shops" and catalogs. I know as well as most of you that these (almost always analog) scrambler systems even with thier "10,000 code frequencies!" and such are totaly insecure against an attacker with modern resources, but I was wondering if any of these techniques would be good enough to use for real-time applications where the transmitted data is only valuable for 6 hours or less.

The simplest of these devices is the single band frequency inverter. It operates by mixing incoming voice with a carrier (usually around the top of the voice band) in a double balanced mixer and sending the resulting spectrum down the wire. It is not secure at all against anyone with very simple and widely available equipment - at most it would take such a person a few seconds to find the carrier frequency. And as any ham will tell you, it gets pretty easy to understand inverted or off frequency speech with practice. Most of the really super cheap (under $50 or $100) scramblers are of this toy type. A more complex varient of this is the multiband or split band inverter. This was allegedly used early in World War II for medium security communications. It operates by splitting the voice spectrum into several frequency subbands and swapping those subbands around according to a pattern determined by a key. Masking tones or noise may be added in some of the bands to make understanding harder. Scramblers of this fixed shuffle type can generally be broken easily with DSP techniques. They are not common as current day products. A modern varient of the multiband shuffling scrambler has been used by the US government for low security communications until recently (as the KY-65 Parkhill system). This rolling code scrambler shuffles the voice subband components dynamically several times a second under control of a psuedo random sequence determined by a key and plays some of them forward and some backwards from digital memories. This system requires much cleverer real time DSP signal analysis software to break than the fixed shuffle of world war II stuff, but allegedly some amateurs were able to recover intelligable speech from it without knowing the key sequences. There are lots of commercial versions of this type of scrambler available all over the world - they run from the low hundreds of dollars to the low thousands. Given an attack based on making a best guess as to specific phonemes and phomeme sequences from a particular speaker rather than trying to crack the psuedo-random shuffling sequence, speech from such a device could probably be rendered intelligible in seconds to minutes using modern high perfomance DSPs and fast workstation processors and very clever software, but of course the software to do this is not widely public and the results are probably highly variable and speaker and signal quality dependant. In general, the availablity of high performance processors and better speech recognition algorithms makes this approach more and more possible in shorter and shorter amounts of time. Cracking the psuedo random sequence used in rolling code scramblers is a more classic cryptologic problem and varies greatly in difficulty depending on the particular design. This might take seconds, minutes or many days depending on what generates the sequence and how much "plaintext" can be recovered by signal analysis. Obviously once cracked the speech can be recovered in real time using simple gear.

Such a system would be usefull if you only need security 'right now' and didn't care who knew after a certain (short) timeframe. Comments, advice and product reviews are all welcome from anyone with knowledge or experience in the area.

My advice would be to use one of the digital scrambling technologies. Lots of surplus US government DES equiped HT's are available if radio communications are your purpose... (signature under construction)