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Someone needs to find a way to make end to end encryption of phone calls a reality. I can think of technical solutions but it's another matter to get adoption.

Someone needs to find a way to make end to end encryption of phone calls a reality. I can think of technical solutions but it's another matter to get adoption. Also it can't only be an app. The phone can not be trusted. I think you'd need a small device that connects via wifi to your phone and then run some encryption over the top of that. It could be very small with only speaker and mic capabilities. Then you'd have an app on your phone to initial calls and display incoming calls.

contingencies 13y ago
You could check out RedPhone @ https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice Unfortunately right now if you use something like that you simply stick out immediately as interesting traffic to target...
steve19 13y ago
End-to-end while useful won't help this problem. They are keeping track of meta-data, so they are amassing a huge database of who every American associates with over the phone. This "meta data" is a huge part of Signals Intelligence and is very useful even if you can't hear the call itself (which is not to say they are not recording those as well). The only way around it would be a TOR like system (or a system running on TOR) to obfuscate who everyone talks to.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  Well, technical solutions aren't the answer in cases like this. What we need is political buy-in. We need people to feel as we feel. If enough people felt that way, then this wouldn't be happening. And since not enough people feel that way, then no technical solution will matter, unfortunately.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Ha! Funny you mention it, because guess who needs protected and secure phone communication without leaking metadata? ... Yap it is them, the government. Behold NSA's own "Mobility Capability" spec http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_1.pdf http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_... In this spec they define what a mobile device would have to do to be available and good enough to handle government's classified data. How do you know what NSA knows? Usually by looking at what it suggests for government's use. They allegedly know what is already cracked, insecure and exploitable. (For ex. they suggest a specific pattern of erasing hard drives with sensitive data, they might say do it in 3 passes, so maybe assume they can recover data in less than 3 passes, so it gives you a glimpse into what's happening). So to cut to the chase, how does one hide metadata? Tunneling. You create a device that has some kind of a trusted boot mechanism, loads a trusted OS, and connecst to an exclusive VPN. Nothing enters or leaves the devices via a network that is not _the_ VPN network. Of course in their case the only metadata leaking is that this device is talking to government's central VPN server. Then there are TLS and SRTP channels created that encrypt the voice but metadata is presumably encrypted or hidden by the outer VPN. Now that is for the government. Now you'd need to set up a a few trusted VPN servers around the world make sure your phone connect to them and all the calls are routed through them as well. That way you could hide the metadata... and probably eventually land on some black list of sorts... ;-) I kid...only slightly [On a side note there is a known vulnerability in how compressed & encrypted voice data is transmitted that makes it reveal the contents, and that is by analyzing the statistical distribution of data (even encrypted) from that it is possible to deduce the message content -- http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf so, make sure to play relatively loud music in the background , well shit by now I am sure I am on some list somewhere...]
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    >On a side note there is a known vulnerability in how compressed & encrypted voice data is transmitted that makes it reveal the contents, and that is by analyzing the statistical distribution of data (even encrypted) from that it is possible to deduce the message content -- http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf so, make sure to play relatively loud music in the background It seems like the better solution would be to just use fixed bitrate compression.
- pasbesoin 13y ago
  I don't have a reference on hand to cite, but I recall more than one bit of reportage of studies of traffic analysis of this sort; the upshot was that researchers found in practice that it revealed a surprising amount about the network and nodes being studied -- more than they'd anticipated. Encrypted content provides you no protection against this sort of analysis.
imperio59 13y ago
Assuming you trust the certificate chains to the root certs to be fully trustable and not to have been compromised via secret court order as well...
derrida 13y ago
ZRTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP As others have said, end-to-end encryption this not solve the problem of calculating a persons social networks and the strength of those connections by correlating calling frequency and duration (as the information in the leaked court order could be used to do). For that you would need a Tor-like network. The Guardian Project have attempted to do some work in this area, sending VOIP over Tor, but the latency is quite high at the moment: so it requires using some of the old radio protocols when there was a possibility of interference and to make it clear when you had stopped talking "over and out", "roger" etc.
smacktoward 13y ago
I know technical solutions to problems like this are the first ones that leap to mind to HNers, but IMHO they are exactly the wrong response. Citizens of democratic societies should not have to hide their communications from their government. If their government violates this trust, the thing to do is to organize and turn those governments out of office. Encrypting phone calls doesn't solve the problem; the problem isn't the surveillance, it's the contempt for the law and the rights of citizens that the surveillance is just one manifestation of.

contingencies 13y ago

You could check out RedPhone @ https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice Unfortunately right now if you use something like that you simply stick out immediately as interesting traffic to target...

steve19 13y ago

End-to-end while useful won't help this problem. They are keeping track of meta-data, so they are amassing a huge database of who every American associates with over the phone. This "meta data" is a huge part of Signals Intelligence and is very useful even if you can't hear the call itself (which is not to say they are not recording those as well). The only way around it would be a TOR like system (or a system running on TOR) to obfuscate who everyone talks to.

sillysaurus 13y ago
Well, technical solutions aren't the answer in cases like this. What we need is political buy-in. We need people to feel as we feel. If enough people felt that way, then this wouldn't be happening. And since not enough people feel that way, then no technical solution will matter, unfortunately.
rdtsc 13y ago
Ha! Funny you mention it, because guess who needs protected and secure phone communication without leaking metadata? ... Yap it is them, the government. Behold NSA's own "Mobility Capability" spec http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_1.pdf http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_... In this spec they define what a mobile device would have to do to be available and good enough to handle government's classified data. How do you know what NSA knows? Usually by looking at what it suggests for government's use. They allegedly know what is already cracked, insecure and exploitable. (For ex. they suggest a specific pattern of erasing hard drives with sensitive data, they might say do it in 3 passes, so maybe assume they can recover data in less than 3 passes, so it gives you a glimpse into what's happening). So to cut to the chase, how does one hide metadata? Tunneling. You create a device that has some kind of a trusted boot mechanism, loads a trusted OS, and connecst to an exclusive VPN. Nothing enters or leaves the devices via a network that is not _the_ VPN network. Of course in their case the only metadata leaking is that this device is talking to government's central VPN server. Then there are TLS and SRTP channels created that encrypt the voice but metadata is presumably encrypted or hidden by the outer VPN. Now that is for the government. Now you'd need to set up a a few trusted VPN servers around the world make sure your phone connect to them and all the calls are routed through them as well. That way you could hide the metadata... and probably eventually land on some black list of sorts... ;-) I kid...only slightly [On a side note there is a known vulnerability in how compressed & encrypted voice data is transmitted that makes it reveal the contents, and that is by analyzing the statistical distribution of data (even encrypted) from that it is possible to deduce the message content -- http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf so, make sure to play relatively loud music in the background , well shit by now I am sure I am on some list somewhere...]
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >On a side note there is a known vulnerability in how compressed & encrypted voice data is transmitted that makes it reveal the contents, and that is by analyzing the statistical distribution of data (even encrypted) from that it is possible to deduce the message content -- http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf so, make sure to play relatively loud music in the background It seems like the better solution would be to just use fixed bitrate compression.
pasbesoin 13y ago
I don't have a reference on hand to cite, but I recall more than one bit of reportage of studies of traffic analysis of this sort; the upshot was that researchers found in practice that it revealed a surprising amount about the network and nodes being studied -- more than they'd anticipated. Encrypted content provides you no protection against this sort of analysis.

imperio59 13y ago

Assuming you trust the certificate chains to the root certs to be fully trustable and not to have been compromised via secret court order as well...

derrida 13y ago

ZRTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP As others have said, end-to-end encryption this not solve the problem of calculating a persons social networks and the strength of those connections by correlating calling frequency and duration (as the information in the leaked court order could be used to do). For that you would need a Tor-like network. The Guardian Project have attempted to do some work in this area, sending VOIP over Tor, but the latency is quite high at the moment: so it requires using some of the old radio protocols when there was a possibility of interference and to make it clear when you had stopped talking "over and out", "roger" etc.

smacktoward 13y ago

I know technical solutions to problems like this are the first ones that leap to mind to HNers, but IMHO they are exactly the wrong response. Citizens of democratic societies should not have to hide their communications from their government. If their government violates this trust, the thing to do is to organize and turn those governments out of office. Encrypting phone calls doesn't solve the problem; the problem isn't the surveillance, it's the contempt for the law and the rights of citizens that the surveillance is just one manifestation of.