Secure telephone
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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.
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 talk 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 However, this system has now been replaced by the Secure Terminal Equipment (STE) and SCIP standards which defines specifications for the design of equipment to secure both data and voice.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.
The concerns about massive growth of telephone tapping incidents lead to growing demand for secure telephones. Several companies offer their products, eg. Dutch CryptoPhone, Slovak Silentel SecureCall, SecureGSM or the secure telephone division of Siemens AG.
As the popularity of VoIP grows, secure telephony is becoming more of commonplace and less the lonely domain of spies and civil libertarians. Many major hardware and software providers offer it as a standard feature. What used to only be available at high expense and to a limited number of people is now freely available. One of the most popular softphones is Skype, providing end-to-end encryption for PC-to-PC calls, though as it is closed-source, its security cannot be definitively verified. Other examples include the Gizmo Project and Twinkle. There are several manufacturers of hardware Analog Telephony Adapters such as Sipura/linksys and Snom which offer easy to use secure options.
Products of historical significance are PGPfone and Nautilus (designed as a non-backdoored alternative to Clipper), and now officially discontinued (but continuing living on SourceForge) SpeakFreely, and the security VoIP protocol wrapper Zfone developed by the creator of PGP. Other historical options involved scrambling generally using a form of voice inversion. This was available from electronic hobbyist kit suppliers and is common on FRS radios.
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