How the Greek cellphone network was tapped.

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Tue Jul 17 00:45:49 EDT 2007


"Leichter, Jerry" <leichter_jerrold at emc.com> writes:

>Between encrypted VOIP over WIFI and eventually over broadband cell - keeping
>people from running voice over their broadband connections is a battle the
>telco's can't win in the long run - and just plain encrypted cell phone
>calls, I think in a couple of years anyone who wants secure phone connections
>will have them.

I think you're looking at this a bit wrong.  I rememeber the same opinion as
the above being expressed on the brew-a-stu list about fifteen years ago, and
no doubt some other list will carry it in another fifteen years time, with
nothing else having changed.  Anyone who wants secure voice connections
(governments/military and a vanishingly small number of hardcore geeks)
already have them, and have had them for years.  Everyone else just doesn't
care, and probably never will.  This is why every single encrypted-phones-for-
the-masses project has failed in the market.  People don't see phone
eavesdropping as a threat, and therefore any product that has a nonzero price
difference or nonzero usability difference over an unencrypted one will fail.
This is why the only successful encrypted phone to date has been Skype,
because the crypto comes for free.

I once had a chat with someone who was responsible for indoctrinating the
newbies that turn up in government after each election into things like phone
security practices.  He told me that after a full day of drilling it into them
(well, alongside a lot of other stuff from other departments) it sometimes
took them as long as a week before they were back to loudly discussing
sensitive information on a cellphone in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

So in terms of secure voice communications, the military and geeks are already
well served, and everyone else doesn't care.  Next, please.

Peter.

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