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PGP Now For Windows Softphones |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 23 May 2006 |
Callers wanting to keep their phone calls secure from unwanted eavesdropper can now access a Windows-based version of PGP for softphones.
Back in March Phil Zimmerman, of PGP fame, made Zfone available on the Linux and Mac OS X platform, as we reported here.
Now the public Beta for Zfone includes Windows flavour.
According to Zimmerman’s website Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP. The peculiar thing about this protocol that makes it attractive for use in IP Telephony applications is that it does not rely on a traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that you would normally expect from an encryption solution.
A PKI type infrastructure requires encryption keys to be exchanged between parties, either through email or through some soft of key management server, instead, with the ZRTP protocol the key exchange is carried out peer-to-peer as part of the call setup.
Zimmerman says this is better than other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without it doesn’t rely on SIP signalling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all.
Although Zimmerman has made the system available as a software download, the real goal is to try to get phone makers to licence the technology for inclusion in their products.
Zimmerman has submitted Zfone to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.
You can use a variety of different software VoIP clients to make a VoIP call and the Zfone software will detect the call and initiate a cryptographic key agreement between the two parties - assuming the other caller has Zfone installed - and then proceeds to encrypt and decrypt the voice packets on the fly.
The system will only work with softphones at the moment by sitting in the Internet Protocol stack and intercepting IP Telephony traffic, encrypting/decrypting it and passing it on. To work with an Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA), IP Phone because it would need to be integrated into the hardware. Nor will Zfone work with IAX (Asterix) yet, as Zimmerman says the two are not well suited to interwork but that he might look into it in the future.
The system will not work with Skype because it uses a proprietary encryption system of its own.
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