Crypto in everyday cellphones

Tue May 3 15:56:56 PDT 2005

While the errors are both glaring and funny as hell in the below article,
the concept is an interesting one.

-- 
Yours,

J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org
0xBD4A95BF

	"What this country needs is a good old fashioned nuclear enema."

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Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:15:50 -0700
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/24/business/wireless25.php

Secure communications: Available, but not cheap

<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=By%20Andreas%20Tzortzis&sor
t=swishrank> By Andreas Tzortzis International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2005

In the 1990s, everyone from blue-chip company executives to Princess
Diana fell victim to mobile phone eavesdroppers who recorded their
conversations for financial gain. Since then, technology to encrypt
calls has gotten better, but the bad boys have been playing catch-up
too.

Last month, Silentel, a Bratislava, Slovakia, technology company, became
the newest arrival in the small but growing market for secure mobile
calls.

Like Beaucom in Munich and its crosstown rival, Rohde & Schwarz, along
with a General Dynamics unit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Silentel promises
security by encypting voice conversations with mind-numbingly
complicated codes. But while Beaucom features an encryption card and the
Sectira wireless phone from General Dynamics works with a built-in
encryption chip, Silentel says it is the first to offer a software
solution.

Clients can download a software application that works with the Symbian
operating system, which is used in phones made by Ericsson, Nokia,
Motorola and others, according to Igor Kocis, chief executive of
Silentel.

To make a secure call, you punch a button on the phone and begin calling
the other phone, which must also have the technology. The software
compresses your voice into data and encrypts it using a digital key with
a sequence 256 bits long. That is one step higher than military-level
encryption, which is 128 bits and would take a computer years to crack.

"Then your voice, in encrypted form, is transferred directly to the
phone of your partner, in contrast to standard communication where it is
not encrypted after it hits the nearest tower," Kocis said.

At a starting price of 990, or $1,295, it is one of the cheapest
solutions available, he said, and can work with 10 Nokia and Siemens
phone models.

But if clients want the ability to talk at the same time during a
conversation, they have to pay 200 more for a piece of hardware that
stores and safeguards the digital keys and allows callers to talk
simultaneously.

The company officially began selling the products in March. Kocis said
he hoped to one day count governments, security agencies, business
executives and lawyers as his customers.

"We see a market anywhere - in Western Europe, in developing countries,"
said Kocis, who studied cryptography in Bratislava and whose father was
a cryptologist who worked with the Czechoslovakian government during the
cold war.

When Siemens in 2000 introduced an encrypted version of its popular S35i
phone, Interior Minister Otto Schily of Germany received the first one.
Five years later, frustrated German police officials say they still
haven't been able to crack the encryption code.

"Not only are we not technically able to listen in, but we don't have
the legal ability to force companies to tell us how to do it," said
Bernd Carstensen, a spokesman for Germany's Union of Police
Investigators. "That means if someone is using these phones to plan a
crime, we aren't able to listen in."

But secure mobile phones haven't exactly flooded the market, so
governments have not been concerned, said Peter B|ttgen, a spokesman for
Germany's data protection commissioner.

Beaucom introduced its Enigma phone on the market in 2003. The handset,
which it said cost more than 6 million to develop, has a card inside
that stores and produces random encryption keys for each call. Since its
introduction, the company has sold "a few thousand handsets" at about
2,200 each, said Wilhelm Decker, Beaucom's representative in Germany.
"We expected it to go up a lot earlier," he said about the market for
secure calls. "But it's coming, slowly but surely."

Some have their doubts. Justin King, a director of the London security
company C2i International, said that the signal quality of secure mobile
phones was still a problem.

"It's a Catch 22," said King, whose business advises large companies on
counter-espionage measures. "These products are expensive. We'd rather
spend #200 on air fare and talk about whatever it is at a coffee shop."