Swiss company Vectrotel makes and markets the Vectrotel X8, a GSM cell phone that encrypts your conversations with an unbreakable cypher. Here's how it works. First off, you need two phones. When you place a secure call (you can also place regular calls), they perform a 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman shared secret exchange, to generate a secret 128-bit key. This process takes between 10 to 30 seconds. Only the two phones share this unique key: it is generated before each call, and deleted after each call. Once the key is generated, conversation is subsequently encrypted and your call is secure. What's even more interesting is that they have made the phone inconspicuous. The triband unit looks (and also works) like a regular cell phone, and even boasts some decent specs: IR, Bluetooth and USB connections, 1.3MP camera, 240 X 320 QVGA screen, 5 hours regular and 4 hours encrypted talktime.

quote:

Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which is better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.


http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/zfone/index.html

very cool, but i wonder how long before that technology is deemed either illegal for consumers to have, or before they "hire" some hackers out of prison to break it for them.

The government, atleast here, goes crazy about not knowing everything.

On a similar topic, isn't there encrypted VoIP out there somewhere?