Secure phone

A secure telephone is a telephone that provides voice security in the form of end-to-end encryption for the telephone call, and in some cases also the mutual authentication of the call parties, protecting them against a man-in-the-middle attack. Concerns about massive growth of telephone tapping incidents led to growing demand for secure telephones.

The practical availability of secure telephones is restricted by several factors; notably politics, export issues, incompatibility between different products (the devices on each side of the call have to use the same protocol), and high (though recently decreasing) price of the devices.

The best-known product on the US government market is the STU-III family. However, this system has now been replaced by the Secure Terminal Equipment (STE) and standards which defines specifications for the design of equipment to secure both data and voice. The SCIP standard was developed by the NSA and the US DOD to derive more interoperability between secure communication equipment. A new family of standard secure phones has been created based on Philip Zimmermann's VoIP encryption standard ZRTP.

As the popularity of VoIP grows, secure telephony is becoming more widely used. Many major hardware and software providers offer it as a standard feature at no extra cost.

Examples include the Gizmo5 and Twinkle. Both of the former work with offerings from the founder of PGP, Phil Zimmermann, and his VoIP secure protocol, ZRTP. ZRTP is implemented in, amongst others, Ripcord Networks product SecurePC with up to NSA Suite B compliant Elliptic Curve math libraries. ZRTP is also being made available for mobile GSM CSD as a new standard for non-VoIP secure calls.

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