Encrypt cell phones calls!!!!

[perse0]

Hello,

im new in the forum, who knows about encrypting phone calls?


thanks in advanced!!

[franklin97355]

You could always talk in pig latin.

[eil]

What kind of calls? VoIP calls can be encrypted relatively easily, there are loads of ways to do it.

Landline phones? I'm not sure, but I believe there are devices out there to do it. Or you could roll your own with a pair of old modems.

Cell phone? Short answer: No. Long answer: In the U.S. at least, the carriers can't encrypt the calls because CALEA requires them to accommodate law enforcement wiretaps. Plus, encryption would add overhead to their precious bandwidth. Plus, the lossy compression performed on a digital cell phone voice stream mangles normal audio so as to be just a hair above completely unintelligible thus encrypted audio certainly wouldn't make it through.

[ILUsion]

As eil points out, cell phone calls are heavily compressed with lossless compression specially suited for the human voice (even DTMF codes get mangled; just to give an idea: a gsm cell phone compresses its audio track to a 13 kbps stream (FYI: an mp3 file with sub-cd quality audio requires 128 kbps for stereo sound)).

But as a first concept, if delay is not really a problem: reversed speech is not clearly understandable and might make it through the compression. Though it's not as good as real encryption, it's something that might work (I haven't tested it). And perhaps even a bit better delay-wise: splitting the audio-stream in chunks (of a few hundred ms or even a few seconds), can lower the delay but I guess the shorter each chunk of reverse audio, the better it could become to understand everything.

For shorted messages, it might work to just send audio files through MMS; and those audio files can of course be altered in any way you want, I guess.

So the most secure option would be to use VoIP, which can be encrypted without problem.

[Sorceress Sarah]

Ya know, I can't imagine a more effective way to attract the attention of Echelon. . .

[Bandit]

You could learn to talk like a chav, no one would understand you

[Entropy]

Hello,

im new in the forum, who knows about encrypting phone calls?


thanks in advanced!!

Google Sectera.

I think there are civilian variants. You can't buy the Type I certified units unless you're a government contractor or the government themselves. I have no idea whether or not the civilian variants have any sort of backdooring.

[Ramjet1]

There is no encryption technology available to the general population that will prevent government / law enforcement from being able to read the data stream. Depending on who wants to read it, it's trivial.

[gwenhastings]

not quite so fast.. there is cryptophone also http://www.cryptophone.de/ and the unit I was just recommended to is this one...http://www.cryptophone.de/en/products/mobile/cp400/..


gwen
some other products will shake out I suspect...

[Syn7]

It's voip. Not quite the same as encrypting a cell phone. I'm sure it works fine tho.